Nothing is Black

by Deirdre Madden

  She heard the door of the studio slam, and she hurried to put the spoon back in its hiding place. Kevin had wanted to tell Claire, but she said that if he did, she wouldn’t go to Donegal. Claire was so different, she wouldn’t understand. But then again, Nuala herself still didn’t know why she had done what she had.

  4

  ‘I HAD YOUR SISTER IN HERE YESTERDAY,’ Rita Said. Claire looked at her blankly. She didn’t have any sisters. Rita stared back unblinkingly at her across the counter, across swiss rolls filled with pineapple jam and packets of fig rolls. Suddenly Claire realized whom she meant.

  ‘My sister? She’s not my sister.’

  ‘Isn’t she?’ said Rita, the spoken query implying the unspoken one: ‘Then who is she?’

  ‘She’s my cousin.’

  Behind Rita’s head, a new blade for a billhook hung from a nail on the wall. The door behind the counter which led from the shop into the living room was slightly ajar. Claire could hear a radio on somewhere out in the kitchen: a phone-in, mixed with jingles and adverts. Half heard, it was clear that it had been planned to be only half listened to. Through the door she could see a floral carpet and the end of a tweedy sofa. She could visualize the rest of the room from memory.

  You could get everything you needed to keep body and soul together in Rita’s shop: tea and asprin, cigarettes and milk, thick socks, Mars Bars, Tampax, tinned peas, newspapers. To go into it for the first time, the range of stock looked eccentric until you actually came to rely on Rita for things, and then you realized that it was quite sensible and comprehensive. Once, in an art magazine in Germany, Claire had seen a series of photographs of a house and shop in Scotland which looked just like Rita’s. She’d been surprised how much it had annoyed her. Had blandness reached such proportions on the Continent that something as simple and real as Rita’s shop with its boxes of crisps and sliced loaves, and her front room, with her son’s football trophies on the mantelpiece could become objects of fascination and wonder? Claire paid for the things she needed and left the shop. Yes, she’d hated those pictures, but then she’d never had much time for that kind of photograpy, and its endless desire to turn other people’s lives, deaths and living rooms into an aesthetic experience. But Claire herself was aware of how she moved in two worlds at once, with less conflict than she would have thought possible. Take Catholic kitsch for example: some people she knew thought it was a serious aid to religious devotion; other friends liked it because it was camp.

  That she was an artist and that hers was the most drab house in the neighbourhood was an irony not lost on Claire. When she had been away somewhere for a short while it was always good to come back and crest the rise, to see the houses scattered over the landscape. Apart from the bright blue pub, they had mostly been painted in soft, creamy colours: pink, like a marshmallow, yellow, like a scrambled egg. Where she lived provided ample proof of how colour depended on light. Things could look drab, then suddenly vivid when the sun broke through. Her own house at the end of the headland, was of stern grey stone, the wooden eaves, the window frames and sills painted an unremarkable shade of green.

  The house nearest to hers had once been grey too, but had been painted white by its present owner, a Dutch woman named Anna. The first time she visited her, Claire had been disconcerted to find that it was all white on the inside, too. Walls and ceilings, a wooden dresser in the kitchen and the bannister had all been painted white. Claire didn’t like it. The absence of colour made her feel uneasy. Anna had shown her around the house with enormous pride. She had been an interior designer back in Holland until her retirement some three years earlier, and had created what she considered to be the perfect Irish country house. Claire wondered if Anna had noticed how unlike other houses in the area it was: Claire’s own, for example, with its fruit and vegetable wallpaper and semi-collapsed sofa in the kitchen. But was that a fair comparison? Claire was renting her house, and nothing had been done to it for years, whereas most of her neighbours took more pride in their homes.

  Out of curiosity, Claire had pressed Anna to tell her what she disliked about Donegal, but the Dutch woman was tactful to a fault, and would make no criticisms. Only when Claire persisted did she say reluctantly, ‘Well, this is my professional self coming out, but I do think some of the new houses here are quite ugly.’

  ‘Bungalow blight, it’s called,’ Claire said. There were no new houses in the immediate vicinity as no one wanted to build in such a remote place, but there were plenty of bungalows near the town. Suddenly Anna dropped her guard.

  ‘I cannot understand why the government allows people to build such ugly houses. They would look hideous no matter where they were, but to see them ruining such a magnificent landscape makes me want to weep. I tell you, Claire, it is a national tragedy, and the people just don’t seem to realize that it’s happening.’

  Claire didn’t argue with her, but she thought Anna was missing the point her own mother had made when Claire herself fulminated against the bungalows.

  ‘You only think that because you have a choice,’ she said firmly. ‘We’ve given you a good education, you’ve had a chance to travel and see things and you’ve decided to come back to Donegal and live simply. But most of the people here have had different lives, and they’ve chosen differently. They grew up in hardship and now when they can have comfort and luxury, they want it, and who’s to blame them for that? Maybe you don’t like their cabinets full of Waterford Glass and their chandeliers, but they do.’ Claire remembered this when Anna delightedly showed her the antique butter-making equipment she had recently bought: butter pats, stamps, a wooden bowl.

  Anna had bought her house some years back from a German family, who had sold up at the end of their second summer there. The purchase had been a mistake, something they readily admitted, even though they liked Donegal. The problem was that they had simply underestimated the place, particularly its weather and isolation. Only after they had done it once did they fully appreciate the difficult logistics involved in getting a car and two tiny children and all the things they considered necessary for a summer across a large tract of Europe and two stretches of water. Claire heard through Rita that they had bought a holiday home in Italy with the money they got when they sold the house to Anna.

  Anna also brought her car over from the Continent every summer, but didn’t seem to consider it too troublesome. She remarked that it was the price to be paid for coming to such a place. If it had been more easily accessible, then it would have been overrun and spoilt long since, losing the emptiness which was, for her, a special part of its charm.

  Claire had always found Anna to be exceptionally reserved, and even though they now knew each other well, she still knew precious little about her life back in Holland. For a long time Claire had assumed she was divorced, but then Anna told her that her husband was dead. She once mentioned a grown-up daughter, but never talked about her. Claire wasn’t convinced that she was suited to living on her own, no matter how much Anna protested that she loved it. She struck Claire as someone who needed company, and fortunately she was popular locally, fitting in exceptionally well there. Rita was one of her best friends, a fact which baffled Claire.

  As she walked back from Rita’s shop that morning, she wasn’t surprised to see, when she was still some distance from it, the door of Anna’s house open and Nuala emerge. In the short time she had been there, Nuala had already become fast friends with the older woman. Claire had known that it would be so: even before Nuala’s arrival she had rung Anna to ask if her cousin might call to visit her. She phrased it as though she were asking a favour, but knew that she was really doing Anna a kindness, and this was confirmed in the delight with which she spoke to Claire after Nuala’s first visit.

  ‘And she’s to stay for the whole summer?’ Anna asked.

  ‘That’s the idea, anyway,’ Claire replied.

  ‘But why is she here?’ asked Anna, suddenly shrewd.

  ‘Oh, you’ll have to find that out for
yourself,’ Claire said.

  For her part, Nuala also announced herself well pleased with her new friend, returning to Claire’s house with a stack of glossy French and Italian interior design magazines and a wedge of home-made cake. The only problem had arisen from Anna’s interest in Nuala’s name.

  ‘It was so embarrassing,’ Nuala said. ‘She started talking about the Children of Lir, and I was racking my brains trying to remember the story. I haven’t even thought about it since I was a kid, but she knew it chapter and verse.’

  ‘What Anna doesn’t know about Irish customs and mythology isn’t worth knowing,’ Claire told her. ‘She’s even been teaching herself to read Irish.’

  Never in all her life had Claire seen as slow a walker as Nuala. The two of them had attempted to go for a walk together at the weekend, but it hadn’t been a success. She realized now what a mistake it had been: although maybe she had been the one who was at fault, in expecting too much. Nuala had been amazed and appalled by the distance Claire had expected her to cover, something Claire had been able to tell even before they left the house. The seriousness of the preparations, with their emphasis on thick socks and waterproof clothing, clearly alarmed Nuala, although she tried not to show it. Once they got out on to the hills, Claire was exasperated, in spite of herself, by Nuala’s slowness and lack of energy. The expedition didn’t last long, and before they were home, Claire was silently vowing not to repeat the experience for the rest of the summer.

  As they walked back to the house now, Claire had to slow down almost to a standstill so as not to catch up with her dawdling guest. She was avoiding her simply because they spent so much time together as it was. For all that, she wasn’t finding Nuala’s presence as tiresome as she had feared it might be.

  The first couple of days she had found eerie. Nuala looked exactly like Claire’s childhood memories of Auntie Kate. It wasn’t just that she had exactly the same small stature, round blue eyes and general air of glossy well-being as her mother. She had all her mannerisms too, the same inflections of voice and turns of phrase, and given Auntie Kate was now almost a year dead, Claire couldn’t help finding it slightly creepy.

  A routine had quickly been established. Every morning, after breakfast, Claire would go to her studio, while Nuala walked down to Rita’s shop and bought a newspaper. On returning to the house, she would spend the remainder of the forenoon reading the paper and drinking tea, until it was time for her to begin preparing lunch. She had insisted on doing the cooking while she was there, but brushed off any compliments Claire made about the meals she prepared.

  ‘You must be kidding. Kevin’s a far better cook than I am, he never even lets me cook at home. I know you may find this hard to believe, but I’m not really very interested in food. I have to pretend, of course, because of the restaurant. It wouldn’t do for the image. I look after the money side of the business, and Kevin and the chef take everything to do with the menu planning. But because we run it together I have to play the part when journalists come to do features for the food pages. I always think it’s such a hoot afterwards, they write guff like, “Kevin and Nuala care passionately about wild berries.” Of course we clip the article and put it in the window, and you wouldn’t believe how things like that draw people in. Anyway, I probably shouldn’t be telling you this. Kevin gets really upset if I make jokes about it to anyone in Dublin. He’s afraid it’ll get about and people will think we’re cynical, and that it’ll ruin the business. As if I’d be so foolish as to let a thing like that happen!’

  Claire wasn’t as surprised by this as Nuala might have expected, for she had already noticed her indifference to food, how she was even given to eating things like Mars Bars – two at a sitting – or sickly sweet cakes from Rita’s shop.

  ‘Mind you,’ Nuala had added, ‘it was my idea that we open an Irish restaurant. Kevin wanted it to be an Italian place, but I said no. Told him we wouldn’t last six months if we did that. Bacon and cabbage, colcannon, boxty, things like that I told him, but he thought I was being really cynical. “You mean a restaurant for tourists?” he said to me. “A good restaurant,” I said. I knew that if we offered the very best of Irish food, traditional dishes cooked to perfection, good bread, fish, beautifully served, that we would do well. “We’ll get everyone,” I said to him. ‘Tourists, locals, the lot.” And I was right, of course.’

  After dinner, sitting by the fire, Nuala would sometimes remind Nuala of an animal moulting. She emanated that same air of glumness, of knowing that there was something amiss, while not quite knowing what it was. Claire was tempted to say to her, ‘It’s called life, Nuala, and you’d better get used to it,’ but she didn’t because she knew that Nuala wouldn’t understand. This was something she would have to work through for herself, and she could have done a lot worse than come to Donegal to do it.

  5

  IT UPSET HER out of all proportion when she awoke one morning around dawn, and couldn’t remember where she was. One side of the bed was against the wall, and where was Kevin? Blankets rather than a quilt, the room had a wooden ceiling …

  Nuala realized instantaneously that she was in Claire’s house, but that was little consolation. The outstanding question remained: Why was she here? And why had the oddness of it not struck her until now?

  Things were no clearer later that day, when she sat on the beach below Claire’s house, in a relatively secluded and sheltered spot behind some rocks. Moodily she took up handfuls of sand, let it run through her fingers, took up more sand, and again let it scatter. Out in the bay there were five large dark birds sitting on an outcrop of rock. She’d seen them there a few days earlier, and described them to Claire, who had told her what they were called. But Nuala had already forgotten the name Claire had given them.

  Why was she here? It baffled her, and that was the only thing that consoled her. Bafflement had become her natural state over the past year, so that it no longer upset her that she didn’t have ready answers for everything. Truer to say that she didn’t have answers for anything now. To all Kevin’s questions, to her father, the doctor, to those few people who had been close enough to know that something was wrong and asked her what it was, she had only been able to answer, ‘I don’t know.’ She had been afraid to tell them just how confused she was.

  Baffled was the word she had used to the doctor who asked her if she was depressed. ‘Oh no,’ she’d replied. ‘Just baffled. Absolutely baffled.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Everything. The only thing I’m certain about is that I’m confused.’ And confusion was exhausting. It had been her own decision to come to Donegal. She didn’t know if it would help, but thought it might eliminate some of the questions that troubled her. In that, she had been right. Being around Anna and Claire was proving to be less puzzling than being with Kevin and the baby.

  It had been her birthday in May, not long before Kevin found out what she had been up to. He asked the chef in the restaurant to bake a cake for her, with a ribbon on it, and candles.

  ‘I wasn’t sure if I ought to do this,’ he said. ‘Maybe you won’t feel like celebrating.’

  She’d spent her birthday last year with her mother. It had fallen on a Saturday, and all four of them had gone out to Wicklow and had lunch in a hotel there. She’d announced to her parents that she was expecting a baby. She’d known for some time, but had saved up the news to tell them. Her mother had been every bit as delighted as Nuala thought she would be, and in the week after that she was already giving her advice and wanting to help her buy the things she would need. The following Saturday, her mother died.

  Grief wasn’t the half of it. It triggered in her a loss of confidence, as if she’d woken up in the middle of life, not knowing how she’d got there. When the baby was born in the autumn, she’d been ashamed to tell anyone how disappointed she was. She kept her feelings hidden from everyone, even from Kevin, allowing herself to manifest only the emotions she thought would be fitting.

  She’d
become obsessed with the idea that she hadn’t known her mother as well as she ought to have done. She’d known her as a mother, but had never seen her as a woman in her own right. Would her own child ever really know her? Nuala did love her baby, but right from the moment it was born its separateness from her both fascinated and appalled. How well, she wondered, did she know her own husband?

  One day in February, Kevin had remarked that B.B. King was coming to Dublin, and he was hoping to go to hear him. ‘But you don’t like jazz.’

  ‘Yes I do,’ he said.

  ‘But I didn’t know you liked B.B. King. You don’t have any of his records.’

  ‘Actually, I do.’

  ‘But you never listen to them.’

  ‘God Nuala, do I have to be a fully paid-up member of his fan club before I can go to one of his concerts? I thought it would be a good night out, why do you have to make such a big deal about it?’

  Another time, Reykjavik was mentioned on television, and Kevin said casually, ‘I was there once.’

  ‘What? You never told me you’d been to Iceland.’

  ‘Well, can you really call three hours in the transit lounge of Keflavik airport “being in Iceland”?’ Apparently, Nuala could.

  ‘I can’t believe I’ve known you all these years and you never told me that!’

  ‘But what was there to tell? A refuelling stop on a cheap flight to the States when I was a student: do you really want to know about that?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘What else are you keeping from me?’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘did I ever tell you that when I was five I had a hamster called Jerry?’