Claire also felt uncomfortable, because she was afraid that Nuala would start to ask her how she felt about children: Did it bother her that she didn’t have any, would she like to have them in the future? She never liked talking about this, but with Nuala, because of who she was married to, she would have found it particularly awkward and embarrassing.
There might well have been a child: she had become pregnant while she was at art school. Nuala didn’t know this: almost no one knew. She hadn’t even told the man concerned. It was a common enough story: she thought she loved him, but going to bed with him had changed everything. By the time she found out what had happened, she didn’t even like him any more. She didn’t want to involve him in any decisions she had to make. Above all, she was afraid of them being forced together by a combination of social pressure and circumstance, and it would all end badly, of that she was certain. More than ten years later, sitting in her own kitchen and looking sideways at Nuala frowning with concentration over her photos, she felt completely vindicated in what she had decided to do.
She still didn’t like to think back to that time. It was no cliché to say that the first weeks had been a nightmare to her. Part of her reason for not telling anyone had been denial on her part. First there was the hope that she was mistaken, followed by the certainty that she was not, which was coupled with a superstitious and certainly absurd idea that if she didn’t tell anyone then it wasn’t real, like a child thinking she couldn’t be seen when her eyes were closed. But then she started to be sick in the mornings. She was living in a grim bedsitter at that time, where the bathroom was three floors down. Wretched with nausea, she would look out over the roofs and chimneys of the city, and despair of knowing what she should do. Every possible scenario she could imagine seemed ghastly in its own way. She looked around the squalid room, and tried to imagine living there with a baby. What if she had to drop out of art school? That was the last thing she wanted. What was she to do, how was she to make a living for herself and the baby? She would have to do what was best for the child: she accepted responsibility for the situation she was in, but couldn’t work out a plan that seemed viable and which would allow her to keep the baby and look after it as it would need to be looked after.
Adoption began to look like the only course open to her. Lots of people who wanted children couldn’t have them, people who could give a baby a degree of material comfort she could never hope to provide.
One of the strangest things was that, through all of this, the baby remained an abstraction. She thought of it constantly, but she knew that the reality of it was somehow always eluding her, until one day when she found herself sharing a table in a café with a woman and a baby, and realized that she was staring at it as if this were the very child whose fate she was trying to decide. She thought she’d never before seen such a gorgeous baby, although she was well aware that nature had designed them to look appealing; cuteness was built into them as an evolutionary weapon. Knowing that made no difference: looking at the baby’s big soft eyes and wet mouth she thought that it was as wrong to regard the situation in which she now found herself in purely functional and pragmatic terms as it would be to deal with it in a purely emotional way. You had to take them on their own terms, which did involve irrationality and affection. The baby smiled across the table at her. Claire smiled back.
She also took careful note of the woman on whose knees the baby was sitting. Not much older than Claire, she was elegantly dressed, and obviously well off. As the woman spooned pudding into the baby’s mouth, Claire gradually realized that without even being aware of it, she had bought society’s message: that some women were entitled to have children and some women were not. This woman was one of the former; Claire was not. And this by her own definition! What had she been doing over the past days and weeks but rationalizing herself out of motherhood. When she imagined giving her baby up for adoption, her image of the child had been hazy, while the image she had in mind of the woman who would become the adoptive mother had been consistent and clear: a woman such as this.
Claire had been long enough in Dublin by that time to visualize, with considerable accuracy, the other woman’s whole life: her house in the suburbs, the restaurants she ate in, the shops where she bought her clothes, where she went in the summer.
You were supposed to choose: that was the hidden contract. You could have your painting and an austere life, or you could have children. You weren’t allowed to have both. ‘Who says I can’t?’ she thought with sudden defiance. She decided there in the café that when the baby was born she would keep it and bring it up herself, no matter how difficult that would be. She’d never really believed that there was such a thing as security anyway, and she felt that in these circumstances this would be helpful to her, and give her strength. The last thing she needed at such a time was delusion.
Her mind had been quite made up. She would always remember the weeks which followed as calm and contented, as she settled down with the decision she’d made. It was early summer. College ended for the holidays, but Claire stayed on in Dublin, which was undergoing a heatwave. She felt more nauseous than ever, and the sweltering weather made it worse, but she felt peaceful and happy for all that.
She lost the baby in the fourth month of her pregnancy. It happened at home: she’d finally gone there to explain the situation to her parents. It was all over even before she had had time to tell them. Her mother cried but she didn’t reproach her, as Claire had been afraid she might.
‘How could I blame you?’ her mother had said, ‘when exactly the same thing happened to me?’
What happened to her mother had been worse. She was only fifteen at the time, and when her father found out, he’d beaten her so hard she lost the baby at once. The family hushed it up. Her father told her he’d beat her again, that he’d throw her out of the house if word got around the neighbourhood about what had happened.
‘I hated men after that,’ Claire’s mother said frankly. ‘They’d brought me only trouble and sorrow, and I wanted nothing more to do with them. I was going to be my own woman. It was fifteen years before I could trust a man again, and even then it wasn’t easy.’
She’d been thirty when she met Claire’s father. ‘I got fond of him, in spite of myself. I loved him, but I was afraid. He wouldn’t take no for an answer. In the end, I went away to Galway, but he came after me. Said he’d keep coming after me, wherever I went. But he made me a promise. He said if we got married and I went away after that, then he’d leave me in peace. “What sort of promise do you call that?” I asked him. “It’s a promise that if you marry me, you’ll always be free,” he said. So I married him, and I’ve always been glad that I did.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me all this sooner?’ Claire asked.
‘Same reason, I suppose, that you’re only telling me now, when it’s late in the day, and the horse has bolted. I’m still ashamed of it. Just think. All those years ago, and I’m still ashamed.’
Claire had spent the rest of that summer at home in Donegal, and when she went back to Dublin in the autumn she moved into a different flat. It was no more appealing than the one in which she had previously been living: the only thing in its favour was freedom from the associations and memories of that time. She didn’t tell any of her friends, although she suspected that Alice guessed what had happened, but was good enough not to ask for confirmation or denial. Unlike her mother, Claire didn’t feel ashamed, but her mother’s story was such a significant part of the whole experience that she felt the only option could be silence. It troubled Claire that had she not got pregnant, that side of her mother’s life would always have remained shut to her. People might often unwittingly remind her of what had happened (as was the case this evening), but other than that, no one had ever been able wilfully to bring up the subject and attempt to reproach her with it.
Years later, what was the net result? It left her a fatalist. She would wince to hear people talk about what they wanted to happen in life,
foolishly confident that they knew their own best interests; worse, that they could have whatever they wanted by effort of will.
She hadn’t ruled out having children in the future, nor dismissed the possibility of spending her life with one particular person. These things had not yet happened, there was no way of knowing whether or not they would happen, but trying to wring out one’s own destiny was doomed, of that she was convinced.
But fatalism was no insulation against hurt. Claire still felt sad when she thought of the baby. To think ‘what if?’ was permissible, never ‘if only …’
Still, her sense of irony had not been diminished by life’s vicissitudes, so she was able to appreciate Nuala’s presence in the house. Nuala had noticed that Claire wasn’t really paying attention to the photographs after a certain point, but it didn’t bother her. Suddenly she realized that one of the things she liked most about Claire was that she wasn’t judgemental, and how rare that was. She wanted to tell her, but when Claire looked her in the eye, she faltered, and said something else instead.
7
ONE NIGHT IN JULY, Claire found that she couldn’t get to sleep, even though she had worked hard during the day and was tired. She put it down to there being a full moon. The moon always made her think of her father, the most superstitious person she had ever known. On a night such as this, he would always go outside and turn his money over in his pocket, in the hope that it would double. Once, years ago, he had discovered he was ten pounds short of what he should have had, and the whole family had been enlisted to help him look for it. Only after every possibility had been considered without result did he remember that two nights before that, the moon had been full. Shamefacedly, he admitted that in turning the money over, he must have inadvertently pulled the note out of his pocket, and lost it to a gust of wind. Over the years it had become a family joke, but Claire could still remember how annoyed her mother had been at the time. ‘Maybe that’ll put the pagan practices out of you,’ she’d said, (which of course it didn’t). Not that Claire’s mother was herself free of such superstition: she wouldn’t allow whitethorn in the house, and couldn’t bear to see shoes on the table. Claire had picked up these taboos from example, and it made her feel uneasy to see other people break them.
Anna had taken a keen interest in all this when she talked to her about it once. Claire didn’t understand her neighbour’s attitude, which combined fascination in these things with the most rational, unmystical cast of mind Claire had ever come across.
She was quite enjoying having Nuala to stay. She liked the company, but until her arrival now almost a month ago, Claire hadn’t considered that she lacked companionship. She felt Nuala didn’t merit the interest she was taking in her. Markus would have said that it showed there was too little going on in her life, and that she just hadn’t realized it until then. But of course Markus would never have seen her choosing to live in such a quiet place as anything other than folly. He’d once spent a year in a remote corner of France, much as she was doing now, living alone and painting. ‘Never again,’ he said afterwards. ‘From now on, I’m only ever going to live in big cities. I find my level of vitality rises or falls to meet the level of vitality of the place where I happen to be.’ He’d spent time in Paris after that, and he’d been happy there. Claire didn’t agree with what he said. She thought it wasn’t true as a general rule, although it was probably true for Markus. But then, that had always been part of the problem: he always had to be doing. Markus had never understood the value of passivity, much less laziness.
Sometimes she wondered if Nuala understood anything else. Before her arrival, Claire had been worried that she would be bored in the country. Now that she was installed in the house, Claire was amazed that the tedium didn’t get to her, but it didn’t appear to bother her in the slightest. She spent more time reading the papers every day than Claire would have thought possible: even old papers from under the stairs. ‘It’s all news, isn’t it?’ she would say, settling down. ‘Just because something terrible happened a month ago, or even years ago, doesn’t mean that it deserves less attention than something that happened yesterday.’
Washing newsprint off her hands before beginning to prepare lunch she said one day, ‘I always think it’s right, somehow, that you’re filthy by the time you’ve finished reading the paper. I always feel grimy inside, so why not outside too?’
Another day she remarked casually, ‘The difference between papers and magazines is that they’re both like mirrors, but only one of them flatters you when you look into it.’ Claire knew what she meant, but pretended she didn’t, because she was interested to know how Nuala would explain it.
‘Well, look at it this way: there was a piece in the paper yesterday about a woman who had a neurosis about touching things when she was out. She felt she had to buy everything she touched in shops, and it was in the paper because she got into trouble with debt. Bought all sorts of things she didn’t want and couldn’t afford. Now, that’s a very rare problem, but I bet lots of people know at least the germ of the feeling behind that. In magazines you get the idea that everybody is, or could be, perfect, but in papers you get the sense that everybody is at least slightly mad. And sometimes that can be a comfort, because you see you’re not the only one. You know, Claire, people are afraid of the most everyday things, but they’re too ashamed to admit it. A friend of mine confided in me that she’s afraid of going to the hairdresser’s. She’ll go to the dentist without a second thought, but has to steel herself for days to get her hair cut. After she told me I thought about it, and I watched people, and I came to the conclusion that there’s nothing so mundane that someone, somewhere, doesn’t feel uneasy about it. Things like using the telephone, even. Or eating out. I see it in the restaurant quite often. But we all go around thinking everyone is more confident than we are, and that no one else knows what it’s like to feel insecure or ill at ease with some everyday thing.’
It wasn’t a consolation to Claire to think about this: the idea stuck in her mind like a hook, making her think of her own inadequacies. That might be constructive during the day, but fatal when lying awake at two in the morning, and she tried frantically to get her mind on to another track.
Painting. Think of her work, yes, think of that. She was glad she was a painter, she’d rather be that than anything else, no matter that it brought her up frequently, painfully, against her own limitations. Sometimes people said painting had come to the end of its natural life. Sometimes she believed them. Strangely enough, this did not make an enormous difference to her. Claire’s father had been a devout Catholic, and once when she was in her teens, she’d asked him, teasing but genuinely curious too, ‘What would you do if somebody proved to you that there’s no God? I mean, beyond any doubt?’
‘Ah, it wouldn’t make much odds,’ he’d replied mildly. ‘I wouldn’t let it keep me from Mass of a Sunday, whatever else.’ Claire’s own dedication to painting was something in the order of this line of reasoning.
Her exchanges with Markus on the subject had always been interesting, not least because there was almost nothing on which they agreed. He used to lament being a sculptor, and insist that the visual arts were inferior to literature. In reply, she would accuse him of despising his own gifts. Images could never have the precision of language, that had been his main argument. That was what she disliked about words, she thought they lacked subtlety. She refused to believe that by writing about apples you could ever say much about things that weren’t apples, but when you looked at a Cézanne painting of a bowl of fruit, it expressed knowledge of other things – mortality, tenderness, beauty – in a way that was only possible without words. Markus claimed this was pure emotionalism.
‘You only think that because you’re afraid of your emotions,’ she’d replied.
‘Better that than be a slave to them,’ he said.
‘You must respond to art with your nerves and your heart,’ she insisted. ‘When you look at a painting, you should feel someth
ing. If not, then there’s something amiss.’
She wondered what he would think of the work she was doing now, so different to what she had been doing when she knew him. She thought he would like it. People used to say to Claire that she had ‘mellowed’ since college. It used to annoy her, for she didn’t believe that it was meant as a compliment, and suspected it was just a sly accusation of softness and loss of energy. She had certainly changed, though, that she would never have denied. Alice had been largely responsible for that, just through Claire having known her.
It hadn’t been an easy friendship. Lots of other students had found it impossible to get along with Alice, she’d been so frank and direct. Claire had admired her even when she hadn’t always agreed with her, or even liked her. Alice might have been hard on other people, but she was harder still on herself. Her aesthetics and morality, her political and religious views were all carefully thought through and were not open to compromise. The idea of saying something just to please someone else, or to spare their feelings would have struck her as bizarre. Holding an opinion simply because it was in vogue was unthinkable. It was only by knowing someone of such relentless integrity that Claire had come to learn how rare a thing it was, and how often social pressure influenced not only what people said, but even what they thought. She realized that she, too, often went with the prevailing opinions through lazy-mindedness, or worse, want of courage. And courage was something Alice had never lacked. She was, without doubt, the bravest person Claire had ever known, and she’d had a relish for life that Claire, when she first knew her, had rather resented. No, be honest, she’d been jealous of her, for her wit and energy. And her talent, yes, that above all. Alice had been a confident, gifted painter. Looking at her work in the studio Claire had known Alice was a better painter than she would ever be. She’d felt jealous, and realizing that made her feel small-minded. It was a long time before she could admire her work freely and honestly. She’d bought from her the painting which now hung in her sitting room. Alice said she could have it if she wanted it, but Claire had insisted on paying. She’d taken it everywhere with her, and it was a touchstone from which she could draw strength, and realize the need for compassion.
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