3
AFTER DINNER THAT EVENING, they sat by the fire. Nuala leafed through some of Claire’s art books, while Claire pretended to read. She found it impossible to concentrate, and kept looking over the top of the book she held, to scrutinize her visitor.
It was less than a week now since her father had rung. She’d known at once that something was up, but could never have guessed what he was about to say to her.
‘Nuala wants to come and stay with you.’
‘Who?’
‘Nuala,’ he said. ‘You know, your cousin. Auntie Kate’s daughter.’
‘That’s who I thought you meant. She’s the only Nuala I know. Or rather, don’t know.’ Claire was mystified as to why her cousin would want to come and stay with her. ‘How long was she thinking of spending here?’
‘A couple of months,’ he replied.
‘Daddy, is this some kind of a joke?’
‘I wish it was,’ he sighed.
As he started to explain, the door behind Claire creaked open. She turned around and stared from the hallway where she stood back into the sitting room she had just left. A painting hanging there caught her eye. It was a small canvas: a still life in oils of a draped doth, some fruit, and a brass jug. It was an austere work, the objects imbued with the moral rigour of Alice, who had painted them; Alice, who had been prodigiously gifted; Alice, who had been in Claire’s class at art college, and who died within two years of having graduated. Claire continued to look at the painting as she talked to her father.
‘What exactly is the problem?’ she asked.
‘Well, it’s hard to know for sure. Kevin says she needs a rest, she’s very tired.’
‘Are you saying she’s depressed?’
‘No, not exactly. Kevin says there’s more to it than that.’
‘Oh great,’ Claire said. ‘Just what I need for the summer.’
‘Ah now, Claire, don’t be like that.’ And by the pleading tone in her father’s voice, she knew he wanted her to say yes. ‘Family’s family, after all. She took it very hard when your Auntie Kate died. And don’t worry, it isn’t that she’s depressed. I asked Kevin particularly about that, because I thought if she was, maybe it wouldn’t be such a good idea for her to go to such a quiet place.’
‘What do the doctors think?’
‘They think she ought to get away from the city, get away from everything for a while.’
Claire didn’t respond. She was still staring at the painting. ‘Hello? Are you still there, Claire?’
‘Yes I am. Listen, Daddy, it’s all right. She can come here if that’s what she wants.’
‘Ah, aren’t you very good.’ She could hear the relief in his voice.
‘Yes, I am, aren’t I?’ she said.
‘By the by, you’re not to worry about money. She’ll give you a good amount for her keep each week. Kevin told me to be sure and tell you that you wouldn’t be out of pocket.’
He would say that, Claire thought, but she made no comment to her father.
‘I think Nuala would like to get away as soon as possible: certainly within the week, if that’s all right with you.’
Claire said that would be fine. They chatted about a few more things and when she had finished she put the phone down, went back into the sitting room and wondered aloud to herself in the empty house what she had let herself in for.
Nuala’s late mother, whom Claire still spoke of as ‘Auntie Kate’, had been a sister of Claire’s father. She had left Donegal as soon as she finished school, moved to Dublin, got married, changed her accent, and tried to convince everyone, not least herself, that she had never lived as she dismissively put it ‘up the country’. Nuala, who was her only child, was exactly the same age as Claire, and the two cousins had nothing in common. There had never been any hostility between the two branches of the family. Instead, a kind of uneasy affection prevailed, and they silently and amicably agreed to differ. ‘We’ve always given each other the benefit of the doubt,’ Claire’s father had said, after a rather stilted visit when Claire was a teenager. She’d never forgotten that remark.
Nuala and Claire had never had much occasion to be together, as they lived so far from each other when they were children. True, Claire had gone to art college in Dublin, but Nuala was at university by that stage, studying economics, and they moved in completely different worlds. By a strange coincidence, Kevin had been in Claire’s year at art school: he’d been one of her best friends at that time. Nuala and Kevin got married within a year of their leaving college. Claire’s parents went to the wedding, and over the coming years they kept her posted with news of the couple which they heard through Auntie Kate and Nuala’s father, Uncle Jack. When Nuala and Kevin bought the restaurant, when they moved house, when Kevin had a minor car accident, when Nuala became pregnant: by means of her parent’s weekly letters all this news found its way to Claire, wherever she was, first when she was travelling on the Continent, and in more recent years when she had moved back to Donegal. She wished them well, and followed their lives with detached interest. The last thing she would ever have expected was that Nuala would express a desire to come and stay with her. And yet there she was now, sitting in the chair opposite Claire and leafing through a book about the mosaics of Ravenna with a desultory air. Claire realized with a start that this woman was in many ways a stranger to her.
Suddenly, Nuala looked up and caught Claire watching her. She didn’t comment on it, but only said, ‘You’ve been there, haven’t you?’
‘To Ravenna? Yes,’ said Claire, ‘I have. Of course, a book like that can only give you an idea of what it’s like. Reproductions never do full justice to works of art, and it’s particularly the case with mosaics.’
‘Why is that?’
‘Well, the colours aren’t accurate, for one thing. You can’t get the effect of light and space in a photograph like that either, and the mosaics are integral to the architecture of the churches. The scale, the light, the texture, even the atmosphere: it’s all so different when you’re actually there.’
‘You really think so?’ said Nuala. ‘Funny, I always enjoy looking at pictures in books much more. You can see the details better there. Sometimes in churches the paintings are so high up you can hardly see them properly at all. And art galleries are generally far too crowded, you can’t get close enough to the paintings to have a proper look. I remember going to see the Mona Lisa in Paris, and I just couldn’t believe that this was what people were making such a fuss about: just this dark, ugly painting, so far away behind a pane of glass. After that I thought, well, I’ll never believe anything people tell me again. You can tell the biggest lie and people will believe it. I bet out of every hundred people who go to see the Mona Lisa ninety-nine of them are disappointed, but they’re too unsure of themselves to admit it.’
‘But you should always remember when you go to a gallery,’ Claire said, ‘that the paintings you see there were never meant to be displayed or viewed in such a way. I doubt if Ravenna would disappoint you.’
But Ravenna had disappointed Claire on her first arrival there, for the town itself was not as she had expected it to be. Ravenna, Corinth, Carthage, Rome: she had realized afterwards that cities with such names could never adequately fulfil the expectations one had of them. And so it had been with Ravenna. Never before had she seen a place from which history had so evidently and dramatically withdrawn. Only when she went to the churches did she find what she had looked for, found more than she had expected. Nothing could have prepared her for the impact made by that strange combination of dimness and vibrant colour, the coolness of the buildings and the vivid, shimmering images they contained. The frieze of women on a gold field: she remembered the sense of motion conveyed by their pointing feet, each figure different, each an individual with her shawl and almond eyes. She remembered the looped curtains of the Emperor’s Palace, the curved boats on a sea of tessellated glass …
It was a long time now since she had visited Raven
na, but her memory of it was still strong. She realized there how her beliefs had changed, without her even having noticed it: faith had withdrawn, just as the sea had abandoned the city. And yet it was in Ravenna that she had begun to appreciate for the first time the spiritual dimension of art. The arrogance of it, for Theodora and Justinian to have their portraits put up like that in a church, above the high altar beside representations of Christ and the saints. For all that, the images of the dead faces touched her more than she could understand. Is this the only possible immortality? Nothing more than this? The decadence of it, the richness of the gold, and the shimmering colours. The Imperial portraits were a strange combination of vulnerability and brute power. She remembered going outside afterwards into the curious lightness of the air, and how frail and lovely the world had looked. For days afterwards she could not stop thinking about the mosaics, was haunted by them, not wanting to believe how much of existence was embodied in those stern faces.
She realized that Nuala was looking at her expectantly, and somewhat ironically. She was glad when, just at that moment, the phone rang. It was Kevin, calling for Nuala. Claire discreetly closed the sitting-room door. When Nuala came back into the room a short while later, she looked abstracted and had evidently forgotten about the mosaics.
The next morning, immediately after breakfast, Claire went straight to her studio. Even before Nuala had left Dublin, Claire had sent a message to her making clear that she would be busy working every day. In autumn she was to have an exhibition in Dublin, and because she had so much to do before then, she was anxious to establish early that she had regular patterns for work which could not be interrupted for visitors.
She sat down and made a quick watercolour of the view from her studio window, which looked out over the headland. This was an exercise which she performed first thing every morning when she went to the studio, as a sort of warm up for the real work of the day. When her work went badly, she would have the consolation of having accomplished at least that. She had been doing this exercise for quite some time now, and this morning, when she had finished, she looked back at some of the earlier landscapes. The view from the window never bored her. It was different every day, and she liked the act of concentration it required to look at it every morning and paint it as though she were seeing it for the first time ever. Not just how things looked, but what one could actually see was dependent on the weather. It was extraordinary how the colours could vary from one day to the next, now vivid, now murky. Sometimes the red and white lighthouse would be obscured by the heavy rains and mist that came in off the Atlantic, sometimes it dominated the picture, bright against the grey sky and the sea. As she looked back over the earlier paintings, she wondered for how long she should continue this practice. She also wondered why these exercises should be so satisfying, because they remained just that, exercises. Although she often struggled with her real work, and was dissatisfied with it, she knew that to try to devote herself seriously to landscape painting would be a serious mistake.
Elsewhere in the house, Nuala was settling in. Having unpacked everything she had brought with her, she realized that her possessions looked absurdly grand in the austere room: the green oiled jacket hanging from a nail behind the door, her diamond rings and pearls on the dressing table, her folding leather alarm clock on the chair beside the bed. She had been annoyed to learn that she couldn’t lock her room: Claire said that the key had been lost. She went to the door and listened carefully. She could hear Claire moving about in her studio. She left the door slightly ajar so that she would be able to hear if there was any movement down the corridor. Then she opened one of her cases and took out a silk handkerchief which was wound around a small, rigid object. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she unwrapped this thing.
It was a teaspoon: a silver teaspoon with the crest of the Shelbourne Hotel on it. It had all started with this, she reflected. God, if Kevin knew she still had this …! Well, he didn’t know. What was it her mother had always said, ‘Well, I’m sure if Daddy never finds out, he won’t mind in the least.’
Of all the things she had … acquired (that was the word she had carefully selected to refer to these objects) over the months, this was the only one which really mattered to her. It was the first and only thing she had really wanted, and it was still redolent of the strange emotions of the whole business.
How long ago was it now? Six months? Yes, about that. It had been a day in January, a wet day. She always hated January. She’d bought herself a new leather handbag that afternoon, but she was unhappy when she came out of the shop, so she had gone to the Shelbourne for coffee and cakes, choosing to go there precisely because she knew she would pay over the odds. Somehow that was important. The handbag had been outrageously expensive too. She didn’t understand the logic behind these things. Were they supposed to make you feel good simply because they cost a lot? Maybe it was the fact of being able to have them that was meant to be satisfying, rather than the object itself, she thought as she sat in the hotel. She realized that she was coming to the end of a brief binge of compulsive spending which worried her while she was involved in it in a way the other business would not. It had started in November, just after her baby daughter was born. She didn’t think it could be connected to that, though, because all the things she bought were for herself.
She would bring home the items she purchased and show them to Kevin, sometimes even telling him that they’d been more expensive than they actually were. She wanted him to understand that there was something wrong; she was asking him to help her. But she was so confused herself that she didn’t know how to ask, except by pulling some dress or jacket from its bag and saying, ‘What do you think of this? It cost me a mint.’ But Kevin never understood. He would only ever say, ‘It looks great. Really suits you. Don’t worry about the money. You work hard, you deserve to have whatever you want. The restaurant would never have been a success if it hadn’t been for you.’
The purchases were experiments as much as anything else. No matter how much the shop assistants would coo at her about it being a dress that would take you into the evening or the suit being easy to wear, she would know even before she bought it that it would make no difference. There’d always been a faint hope, though, hadn’t there? Every time she went into the changing room there was always the idea that when she stepped out and looked in the mirror, she would see someone else looking back at her, her old self would have vanished.
But when that failed to happen, it still wasn’t enough. She always had to see the thing through to the bitter end. The experiment was never over until she had watched them run the slide over her credit card, signed on the dotted line and received the ostentatious bag with the name of the shop printed on it. Experiments. Bloody expensive experiments too, but that day had been different. Something had happened.
She’d been looking at her reflection in a huge mirror, and the sales assistant had been wittering on as usual, something about how it was a bag you could use in any season, when suddenly Nuala interrupted her.
‘I’m going to die,’ she said.
The woman stopped talking and stared at her. Nuala realized the misunderstanding at once and was about to add ‘So are you’, but she thought better of it. The look of pity and confusion on the other woman’s face was more than she could bear. Nuala held the handbag out to her.
‘I’ll take it,’ she said coldly. The assistant completed the sale with minimal conversation. As she handed the bag over, Nuala could see that the other woman was on the point of tears.
She left the shop and went straight to the hotel, ordered coffee and sandwiches and cakes, and decided that she would damn well get a taxi home too, just to finish things off. She hated shopping on her own, that was the truth of it. She’d always gone into town with her mother every Friday for the whole day, and only now did she appreciate just how much she’d loved that. It had made her feel powerful to be out with her mother and be able to buy the best. There’d been something conspirato
rial about it too: assessing lampshades or choosing shoes or trying out lipsticks on the backs of their hands, there was a closeness that was beyond words.
The waitress brought her coffee, and as Nuala stirred it, she noticed the spoon, noticed how heavy and cool it was. She put it on the saucer, and continued to look at it as she drank. And then something quite extraordinary happened.
She realized that she wanted the spoon. No matter that the name of the hotel was stamped upon it; no matter that she had at home a splendid canteen of silver cutlery, a wedding present she had never used; no matter that she had access to any amount of spoons and forks in the restaurant. No, it was that spoon and no other she wanted, and she had never wanted anything so much since she had been a child. How she had longed for things then! She remembered longing for Christmas, longing to be six, to be grown up, above all to have particular things, which were filled with magic by the very fact of her wanting them. The hotel lounge was practically deserted. It would be so easy …
The bill was discreetly presented to her in a fake leather folder. She paid it and left a generous tip. As she walked away from the table, already the waitress was moving in to clear away the cup and plates. Would she notice? No, don’t run – she forced herself to walk at normal speed, breathing deeply, somewhere between elation and terror. Across the lobby, then into the revolving door. If it’s to happen, it’ll happen now …
Nothing.
The rain had stopped, but it was still cold. She crossed the road and went into Stephen’s Green. She felt good now: better than she’d done in months. She felt so good that she took the handbag back to the shop that afternoon and got a credit note for it. She went home on the train, and told Kevin she’d had a good time in town.
‘Didn’t buy anything, though.’
The spoon was special. Everything after that had been an attempt to replicate the feeling she experienced when she walked out of the Shelbourne with it in her pocket. Looking at it she remembered the feeling, but only as one remembers pain or ecstasy: the fact of it, but not the thing itself. Of course it had never been the same again. Kevin would be so upset if he knew she still had the spoon …
Nothing is Black Page 2