Nothing is Black

by Deirdre Madden

  But driving out of Dublin that morning when she was missing, he asked himself if, in all honesty, he regretted marrying her, and he realized that he didn’t. If he had his life to live over, he would have married Nuala again, if only out of a sense of inevitability. To think in this way at all was unusual for him. He thought it was foolish to spend too much time analysing your life and circumstances. It could do little good, as far as Kevin was concerned, and perhaps do harm, arousing discontentment and desires about which nothing could be done. Kevin and Nuala: of course they were married, of course they were together, that was the way it always was. In his heart, Kevin was contemptuous of people who expected marriage – indeed, who expected anything – to make them happy. He couldn’t understand people who expected their lives to be a contented, upward curve of social and economic achievement, rounded out by personal happiness. What was wrong with them? Didn’t they open their eyes and look around? Surely then they would see that such things only happened in movies and magazines. Sometimes he used to argue with Nuala about this, but when he said that people nowadays expected too much from life, she would always say, ‘Oh, don’t be such an old fogey. The real problem was that in the past, people didn’t expect enough.’

  He took being married completely for granted, and up until now, he hadn’t seen anything wrong with this, (although he knew better than to say so out loud, especially to Nuala). It had always seemed inevitable that he would be married, and there had never seemed any possibility that it would be to anyone other than Nuala. The thought of her no longer being in his life struck him as absurd, rather than painful. He couldn’t remember meeting her. She’d been his sister’s best friend at school, and had been in and out of the house from about the age of twelve. She’d always been piggish about sweets: his earliest memory of her concerned the phenomenal quantity of chocolates she put away one evening in their house. That hadn’t changed over the years, whatever else had. Later on, she came to the house just to see him, not to visit his sister. She’d been his first real girlfriend, and neither of their mothers had been happy about it. They said they thought it was too serious, they were afraid they’d get married as soon as they left school, that they’d distract each other from their studies, and so on. The real reasons were that neither mother liked her child’s choice: Nuala’s mother thought Kevin was feckless because he was planning to go to art school, because he wasn’t as respectable as she would have wanted him to be. Kevin’s mother frankly told him she thought Nuala was ‘a minx’. ‘It’s not just that she always has to get her own way: it’s the way she manages to make it look like chance or other people’s doing that I don’t like,’ she said, an observation so astute that Kevin was taken aback when his mother said it to him. He’d lost his virginity to Nuala earlier that month: it had all been Nuala’s idea, but without anything in particular being said, she had been able to make it look like it was all his doing, and she had yielded to him, rather than the other way round. Like the prodigious chocolate consumption, it was a trick she could still turn, years later.

  Both sets of parents had been pleased when they went to college and happier still when the weekend visits cooled off and they gradually lost contact with each other and started seeing other people. They hadn’t even liked each other at that period, on the rare occasions when they met. She thought what he was doing was a childish waste of time. He loathed the clothes she now wore: stiff suits with shoulder pads and fake pearls, floppy bows at the neck of her blouses, the uniform of the business women whose ranks she wanted to join. Kevin thought it looked sterile. He didn’t think he could have anything in common with someone who looked like that.

  And yet as soon as they graduated they were together again within weeks. Before much more time had passed, they were planning their wedding, their house, their future life together. Kevin would never have claimed that he had drifted into marriage. ‘Drift’ was far too mild a word for the speed and velocity with which it happened. And it had never troubled him, never struck him as anything other than logical that it should be so.

  Only now, when there was so clearly something wrong in his marriage did he stop to consider it carefully, to think what it might be. He hadn’t kept Nuala down, he was sure of that. If anything, he had deferred to her, knowing her to be stronger and shrewder than he. Kevin didn’t mind admitting that all their success with the restaurant had been due to Nuala.

  They had both been doing reasonably well in the first years after they married. Nuala had been working with an insurance company in the city centre, Kevin had had a job in a commercial gallery. He would probably have been content to plod along in that way for years, but for a casual remark. They had gone out to dinner in a restaurant one night, and at the end of the meal, like countless other people before him, he’d said over the coffee and mints, ‘Wouldn’t it be lovely if we had our own restaurant?’ Afterwards, he couldn’t remember Nuala making any significant reply to this. It was a dream he had had for a long time, and he was disconcerted when Nuala came to him a week later, all briskness, with the facts and figures on a sheet of paper, announcing that having their own restaurant might well be a viable possibility. She had been to talk to their bank manager, had looked around at possible properties, had spoken to her father about a loan (Kevin wasn’t at all happy about that,) and was still engaged in looking at the restaurants already in operation in Dublin to see what gap there was in the market. When Nuala spoke of it, it all sounded so real that it frightened him. ‘But what if it fails?’ he kept saying nervously.

  ‘It won’t fail because by the time I’ve finished doing my investigations I’ll know whether or not it’s a runner, and if it isn’t, then we won’t do it.’

  ‘Lots of restaurants fold,’ Kevin murmured.

  ‘Yes, of course they do, and do you know why? Because they’re run by people who know a lot about food, but don’t realize that they’re running a business. But I know how to run a business. See if I don’t!’

  It was no empty boast. Kevin had watched anxiously as she carefully worked out all the financial aspects of the project before making a final decision. It brought out, or rather, it exposed to him, a side of Nuala that he hadn’t been aware of up until then. He wasn’t always sure that he liked it. Later, when staff they hired turned out to be unsatisfactory, Nuala fired them without a qualm. She’d insisted that it be an Irish restaurant: they had argued a bit about that, but of course he had given in at last, and of course she had been right. She left the hiring of a chef and the choice of décor to Kevin. She’d been right in everything. The restaurant quickly established a good reputation, and was now a popular and long-established feature of the Dublin social scene.

  Nominally it was a partnership, but it was due to Nuala’s confidence and ability that it existed at all. Kevin had learnt so much from her that he was now able to manage the place well in her absence, but he would never forget that it was all due to Nuala. He could never have done it on his own, and he loved it, loved the atmosphere of the place, the social status and the comfortable lifestyle it gave them. Nuala’s attitude was strange, though, and that troubled him. She wasn’t even very interested in food, she was cynical about the enterprise, he often thought, and would get cross when he complained about this. But she’d been like that right from the start, he didn’t understand what was troubling her so much now. Because he was never in the habit of reasoning out situations, particularly situations of emotional complexity, he didn’t know what to make of the present circumstances. He couldn’t bear to think that something had happened to Nuala. The thought of life without her frightened him. He started to look out anxiously for a phone box.

  Resentment and relief struggled to get the upper hand when Claire told him that Nuala had turned up safe and well. He decided to press on and go to Donegal: he had to talk to Nuala about all this immediately. To turn round and go straight back to Dublin would be cowardly. As he drove on, he considered that he would also see Claire. That would be a mixed pleasure. It would be odd
to see Nuala and Claire together, he considered them as each belonging to such separate phases of his life that it didn’t seem possible that they could both be there simultaneously. He wondered, not for the first time, if it had really been such a good idea for Nuala to stay in Claire’s house. How much was he to blame in this? Maybe he had handled it in the worst possible way in sending her away. Had he just panicked, and thought about what would happen to the business if news of Nuala’s stealing things got about? But there had to be more to it than that. What had made her steal in the first place?

  Was it the baby? Had he, perhaps without even being aware of it, pressurized her into having a baby she didn’t want? No, he was sure that it was not so (although he had to admit that he viewed the child with the same sense of inevitability that he saw in his marriage). No, Nuala had wanted the child, she’d seemed contented with the idea perhaps more before the baby was born than after its birth. But that wasn’t too surprising: Nuala always enjoyed looking forward to things more than the thing itself. ‘How come nothing is ever as good as you think it’s going to be?’ she said, peevishly, on more occasions than he cared to remember. But he always thought it was clear what Nuala was after, even if she was able to persuade you that it was your idea and wish rather than hers. He couldn’t help feeling that she ought to be happy, but he knew that thinking so did nothing to alleviate the fact that she was clearly miserable.

  Around noon, he pulled the car over to the side of the road and took out his lunch. In spite of the circumstances in which he had left the house, he hadn’t neglected to take some food with him: french bread, some cold beef, a wedge of Roquefort cheese, fruit, bottled water. He remembered with horror some of the things he’d been offered in hotels and restaurants in rural Ireland on his rare forays out of the city. When Kevin left Dublin, he was only really happy if he was on his way to the airport. He associated long drives across the country with his childhood, when they went to visit his granny in Tipperary. He’d never liked those visits. Even as a child he had been picky about his food; and even by the standards of the time and place, his granny had been an atrocious cook. He could still remember her gristly stew, and loaves of soda bread, baked to the consistency of a breeze block. As he ate the Roquefort, he remembered how she’d once found an old piece of Cheddar which had been forgotten at the back of the larder for weeks, and was covered with a hairy blue mould when she took it out. She’d set it on the kitchen table and said with amazement, ‘Now if you were to give that to a Frenchman, he’d probably think it was the nicest thing that ever he ate.’

  It had been raining when he left the city, and now, as he sat in the parked car, rain lashed against the windscreen. He switched on the ignition, and briefly turned on the wipers. The Bog of Allen appeared before him, as abruptly and vividly as if he’d switched on a television set: rich brown earth, flat under a complicated sky full of heavy grey clouds. Christ, what a dump! Kevin thought he would rather be bricked up behind a wall than live in such a desolate spot. And yet he had sent Nuala to a place like this, a place where there was nothing. How could she be expected to survive without dress shops and department stores, without a bit of activity going on around her? Maybe she was angry with him, and wanted to give him a fright by doing a bunk for the night. He’d have certainly resented it if he’d been packed off from the city for the summer like that. He switched off the wipers, and let the falling rain obliterate the gloomy scene before him.

  But Nuala was happy in Donegal. She didn’t want to come home. It hurt him deeply to think this. Did she dislike him so much? What had he ever done to her to make her feel so hostile to him? He looked at the dashboard, the crumpled paper containing bread and meat on the seat beside him. He listened to the rain, and suddenly he thought: I want to stay here. He didn’t want to drive on to Donegal, to face Nuala or Claire or anybody, he just wanted to stay there quietly for as long as possible, all day, until night fell, and perhaps on through the night, because life was so baffling, so bloody sad that he just wanted to withdraw from it and be left in peace.

  Was that what she felt too?

  With deep reluctance he put away the remains of his lunch, and continued on his way.

  11

  THE CHIP SHOP where Nuala went the night she stayed away wasn’t the only place locally where you could get a meal. There had been a degree of wilful perversity in her choosing to go there, rather than to some of the restaurants and hotels which had appeared as a result of the tourist trade. Claire suggested two possibilities: a hotel in town which she said did decent meals, and a restaurant called The Silver Salmon, which was patronized not only by tourists, but also the local fishermen and their families, when the catch had been good and they were in funds. They chose to go to the latter.

  Kevin looked ironically at his plate, piled high with steak in a wine sauce, carrots, peas, and a mountain of chips. ‘Obviously nouvelle cuisine hasn’t got as far as Donegal,’ he said.

  ‘No, and I’ll tell you why, Kevin. It’s because the people here have more sense than to pay fifteen quid for a piece of meat the size of a stamp, with one mushroom sitting on top of it. They work too hard for their money here to waste it on nonsense like that.’ Food was the only thing Kevin and Nuala had rows about, sometimes quite serious ones. When they came home from a meal where style had been more important than substance, Nuala would go straight to the fridge and get herself a hunk of bread and cheese, grumbling loudly. ‘What sort of idiots are we to pay money like that and end up coming home as hungry as we were when we left the house?’ Kevin used to wither with shame when she came out with things like that in front of his friends. He was afraid too, that people would get to know what she thought and that it would reflect badly on the restaurant.

  She let her cynicism about the business show much more than was necessary, he often told her, as she mocked the customers behind their backs. ‘They deserve it,’ she insisted. ‘People just follow fashion, Kevin. They don’t know how to think for themselves.’ Sometimes she turned her invective on Kevin himself. ‘Who do you think you’re fooling, with your wild-nettle sauces and your wilted greens! You grew up on spuds, peas and chops, the same as everybody else.’ He’d tell her she was greedy and unsophisticated, but he knew she was every bit as choosy as he, and that a lot of it was just talk, or done to annoy him. But knowing this often didn’t help. ‘When all’s said and done, it’s just a bit of dinner, isn’t it?’ was a remark she could always rely on to infuriate him.

  But tonight Nuala obviously regretted her remark about nouvelle cuisine as soon as she had said it. ‘Eat what you can, if there’s too much there for you,’ she said quietly, picking up her knife and fork.

  All told, things weren’t going anything like as badly as Nuala had feared they would. Claire had come through with far more help and kindness than she had expected, and Nuala thought of her with gratitude. She suggested sensibly that Nuala should be out of the house when Kevin arrived, and rang Anna to ask if Nuala could wait there. So it had been from Anna’s window that she saw Kevin’s car drive past, and she waited there for over half an hour before setting out to walk slowly, so very slowly back to Claire’s house. ‘Time to face the music,’ she said ruefully to Anna, pretending to a levity she certainly didn’t feel, and which didn’t convince Anna for a moment.

  She wondered what Claire had said to Kevin, or what had passed between them before she arrived to make the atmosphere so relaxed and even cheerful. She realized now how nervous she’d been going into the room, afraid that Kevin would be cold and hostile, even that he would be angry and start to shout at her in front of Claire (but that had been a foolish notion: that wasn’t Kevin’s style at all). Without saying anything, he came straight over to her, and put his arms around her, hugged her tightly and kissed her. Nuala was enormously relieved. Claire stayed in the room with them for another three quarters of an hour or so: Nuala had feared that she would bolt off on some pretext as soon as Nuala arrived, leaving them alone together immediately. They had
drunk tea and chatted in what was a remarkably relaxed and amiable fashion, given the circumstances.

  Still, she knew that the hour of reckoning was to come sooner or later, and now, in the restaurant, she was afraid that at any moment Kevin would put down his knife and fork and begin to demand serious answers. She tried to evade this with chatter about anything she could think of: harmless anecdotes about Anna and Claire, and the life she had been leading since coming to Donegal. Kevin let her talk. She didn’t like the way he was looking at her, but was willing to admit that perhaps she was just reading her own guilt into his face. Any other time she would have confronted him with it: ‘Penny for your thoughts, Kevin. What are you looking so serious about?’ but tonight she’d have given him anything for him to keep his thoughts strictly to himself.

  She was reading him wrongly. Kevin’s actual mood, (as Nuala might have guessed, had she thought about it coolly) was one of weariness and disorientation. At exactly this time the night before, he had been standing in his own restaurant in Monkstown. The last place on earth he expected to be twenty-four hours later was sitting opposite Nuala in The Silver Salmon. He’d had to make hurried arrangements at work and find someone to mind the baby, then there had been the worry of wondering what had happened to Nuala, was it his fault that this had happened? And on top of all that, there was sheer weariness, after the long drive across the country. He was glad just to be here and to find Nuala well. The last thing he planned to do tonight was to stir up trouble, or to ‘have it out’ with Nuala, as she herself would have expressed it.