Nothing is Black

by Deirdre Madden

  ‘No Kevin,’ Nuala said plaintively. ‘You never told me that either.’

  Kevin stared at her. ‘What’s got into you at all, Nuala? That was a joke, I mean, none of this stuff matters a damn.’

  ‘It matters to me,’ she said. ‘You’re my husband, I ought to know you.’ Over the following weeks she continued to pester him with questions which even she knew were trivial. She also asked her father to tell her every last thing he could remember about her mother, and it had made him so uneasy that he mentioned it to Kevin.

  She looked at strangers, too, and wondered about their lives. Nuala had wide blue eyes and a frank stare which was more disconcerting than she realized. A man in a red Porsche drew up beside her at a traffic light one afternoon. She gazed over, wondering how much it meant to him to have a car like that. And what real difference did it make anyway? The man saw her looking at him, and drew the wrong conclusion. He leered over at her, and mouthed a silent obscenity. Nuala grinned back nastily, and drew her index finger across her throat. Whatever reaction he had expected, it wasn’t that. The lights changed, and she roared away.

  At night, she would sit in the restaurant at a table near the kitchen door, and would surreptitiously gaze at the guests enjoying their meals. A sort of innocence she thought, fell over people when their food was set in front of them and they started to eat: they became like little children. How did it all connect? There was a woman in a short skirt which was fashionable, but looked absurd on her. Why couldn’t she see that? The elegance of the room, the frail tinkling sounds of cutlery and conversation: and behind the kitchen door, the hot, muffled pandemonium of the kitchen. How did they keep up the pretence? Or did they just not know? One night a woman looked up suddenly while Nuala was staring at her, and each met the other’s gaze. They looked at each other for some moments, then Nuala slowly shook her head. A look of desperation flickered on the woman’s face, then she shrugged and looked away, picked up her wine glass and pretended to join in the conversation. Nuala was sorry she had no answers to give her.

  Shortly after had come the spending sprees, and then she had started to take things. Even now, months later, Nuala couldn’t bring herself to call it stealing, because that would make her a thief, and that was inconceivable. A thief was someone who got into someone else’s car and drove off, or put their hand in your pocket and took your credit cards, or broke into other people’s houses and took their jewellery and hi-fi. She never took from shops. That would have been wrong. Not only did Nuala not want the things she took: she didn’t see how anyone else could possibly want them or place any value on them. First, there was the teaspoon from the hotel. Then more spoons. Promotional ashtrays: a red plastic one with the words ‘Enjoy the real thing’ and the Coca-Cola logo on it in white. Three pins for holding corn on the cob while you ate it. (Three! What more proof could anyone want that she hadn’t been serious about any of this.) A pottery bowl full of packets of sugar and sweeteners. And then there was the teapot.

  ‘I got it in the Kilkenny Design Centre,’ she said bleakly to Kevin.

  ‘Got it? You mean that’s where you took it from,’ he replied pitilessly. ‘It may have escaped your notice, but you can buy teapots in the Kilkenny Design Centre. Dozens of them. All for sale, matching cups and saucers if you want them.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘Then why did you steal it?’

  Nuala didn’t know. She only knew that it had been a mistake. The teapot, which she’d taken from the upstairs café, was too big. She’d noticed a woman at the next table drop her mouthful of cheesecake from her fork and stare in shock as she watched Nuala brazenly cram the teapot into her handbag. She zipped it closed and scowled at the woman, hoping that what she was seeing would be so extraordinary that the woman would literally not believe her eyes, and not report her. She couldn’t take any chances, and left at once. It had annoyed her to have someone gawping at her just at the moment she was discovering a teapot could not be slipped into your bag with the ease and speed that you could get rid of a spoon or an ashtray, particulary when the teapot is hot, and still has tea in it. More tea than she had imagined: as she walked down Nassau Street she could feel the hot liquid seeping through her bag, against her hip. When she got home it took her a long time to clear up the mess. There were tea-leaves in her address book, her diary, everywhere. Grimly picking damp tea-leaves out of her hairbrush, she knew that she had come to the end of something.

  So she took the teapot down to the kitchen and set it on the table, and she brought down all the other things from their hiding places, and set them out too. There were more things than she had thought there would be.

  ‘Where did all this stuff come from?’ Kevin asked when he came in.

  ‘Oh, different places. I didn’t buy any of it,’ she said pointedly, and she watched him as his puzzlement gave way to realization and then to shock. She started the conversation feeling distant, as though all this were happening to someone else, and ended up wishing that it were so.

  Within a week, she was in Donegal. The night before she left, she’d closed herself away and looked at every photo she had of herself: pictures of her wedding day, holiday snapshots, school photos. She looked out at herself from all of them, blank and cheerful. None of them gave her the answer she required, and so she turned to things which belonged to her, some precious, some trivial: a key fob with keys to the house, the car, the restaurant; the opal pendant Kevin had given her the first Christmas after they were married, a pair of espadrilles she’d bought in Crete two summers earlier. She held these things in her hands, wanting to wrest from them the energies they held, the energies she had put into them by possessing them.

  Nothing.

  She came out of the room and said to Kevin, ‘You mustn’t ever think that I don’t love you, because I do.’

  What were those birds called? Cormorants. Yes, that was it, cormorants.

  Was she there just to punish herself? For it was punishment, she dared not think how much she missed Kevin and the baby, how much she missed being at home.

  ‘Do you know exactly why I’m here?’ she had asked Claire at breakfast that morning.

  ‘I think I do,’ Claire replied carefully.

  ‘Does it bother you?’

  ‘Not in the least. Why should it? Most people have a crisis in their lives at one time or another. You might as well have yours now, get it over and done with early, so that you can get on with the rest of your life in peace. Not that you have any real choice in the matter. These things take their course, but they do pass. It’s hard to believe at the time, but it will come to an end.’

  Nuala was grateful for this, and for the casual tone in which Claire spoke these words, but she didn’t know what to say in reply, so she just nodded firmly, and went on eating.

  The cormorants had flown away now, but further along the beach there was a gaggle of small dark birds with spindly red legs. She didn’t know what they were called either, and frankly admitted to herself that she didn’t care. Before coming here, she had never realized there were so very many different types of birds, and secretly she wondered what point there was to it. Whole species could have vanished overnight, and she would never have missed them. And Kevin was even worse than Nuala in this respect. He wouldn’t have lasted a week here, never mind a summer.

  She pulled a bar of chocolate out of her pocket, and ate it absent-mindedly. Sea air gave you an appetite, she thought. It grew colder, and she felt a few drops of rain on her face. Forget the birds: she hadn’t known there were so many different types of rain until she arrived in Donegal. The kind she liked least was the fine mist, almost invisible, that could leave you much wetter than a solid, honest downpour. Claire had asked her to bring back anything interesting she found on the beach.

  ‘Such as?’ Nuala had asked.

  ‘Sea glass,’ Claire said. ‘Bits of pottery. Shells, or pieces of driftwood, but only if they’re particularly interesting.’ There were a few bits of wood, but N
uala thought even Claire would have had to admit they all looked boring. Could a piece of wood that had been floating around in the sea be interesting? She did find a fragment of pottery, though. You always found bits of plate on the beach. Where on earth did they come from? Did so many people have picnics at the beach with proper plates, and did they always come to grief? Did sailors do their washing up over the sides of boats, and did the greasy crockery often slip from their fingers, to be smashed on the rocks and washed up on beaches like this? There had to be a reason. Maybe she would ask Claire, she might know. The rain was getting heavier now: she got up, shook herself, and turned towards the path back to the house.

  6

  WHEN YOU CONSIDER a work of art, size matters. Claire was interested in how the dimensions of a painting or sculpture influenced one’s reaction to it. When she was working, she found that she didn’t have to decide consciously how big or small a painting should be. That was one aspect which had never given her significant problems. She thought it absurd how slides were used to teach art appreciation, not least because it gave the impression that all paintings were the same size. The sense of scale was lost. When she visited art galleries, pictures which she had seen reproduced in books would often turn out to be much larger or smaller than she had imagined they would be, and she often revised her opinion of them when confronted with the original.

  For some painters, it was more of a problem, more of an issue. Alice had been interested in working on a massive scale, but it hadn’t been easy. Her studio was too small, and the materials were expensive. She had been enraged when people had tried to discourage her by saying it would be better to work on smaller canvases, because no one would want to exhibit, much less buy, such huge paintings. She knew what they had in mind: something which would fit comfortably over a mantelpiece.

  There were paintings whose impact depended simply on their being big, such as Warhol’s portrait of Mao. What interested Claire more were such things as Egyptian statues, massive and affecting; or the powerful energies which emanate from tiny Etruscan bronzes. There could be prejudice against a work simply because it was small. Between the wars, Giacometti worked on sculptures of heads which became progressively smaller and smaller until each one was no bigger than a pea, and he was able to carry the work of several years around with him in a large matchbox. Because of this, hardly anyone would take him seriously as an artist.

  Size. And essence. Essence of the subject. Of the material used. Wood different to stone. Stone different to metal. Each metal, each wood, each type of stone different. These materials different collectively to paint, and then in turn, each type of paint having its own resonance. Gauguin. Rough, open-weave canvas transported specially from Paris to the islands of Polynesia, to give his paintings the primitive air he desired. Oils. Acrylics. Too plastic for me, Claire thought, too shiny, the colours garish, difficult to mute. Fine, if that’s what you want. You need new materials to express new realities, just as you need new forms. How to combine the material, the form and the consciousness, that was what it was about. That was why she knew better than to give serious attention to figurative watercolours of landscapes. She was interested in the idea of combining forms and materials which seemed inexorably opposed to each other. The idea of a portrait in pastels which would be completely contemporary appealed to her, but her attempts to execute such a work had never satisfied her.

  She thought a lot about these ideas because she wasn’t happy with her work, and wanted to push through on to a new level. She knew, though, that progress would be made only through the work itself, not by thinking about it. But her mind was scattered. In recent weeks, she had found it hard to concentrate.

  She thought about Nuala. Her otherness. That was what was interesting about it, and provided a suitable distraction for Claire. She would encourage Nuala to go out, and from the window of the studio she would watch her walk away from the house. Claire liked looking at people when they didn’t realize it, when they weren’t looking at her. Not that she was a voyeur: she didn’t want to spy on them when they were doing something which would be generally accepted as private. She just liked to look at a subject without the subject looking back at her. Once she had made a series of paintings which she liked to think of as portraits. They were views of the backs of people’s heads. She liked them because she thought you could actually tell more about a person viewing them in such a way than if you looked them in the face. Faces can deceive. Claire didn’t think there was anything at all anonymous about the back view of a person. You were seeing them as they would never see themselves.

  Nuala’s room. ‘It is in my house,’ Claire thought, ‘but it is different now, because she is there.’ Her things. Yes, Claire would stand by the window and watch until Nuala reached the bottom of the lane, when she would either turn right to go to Anna’s house, or left to go down to the sea. Then Claire would leave the studio and go into Nuala’s room.

  At first she was timid, and would confine herself to standing at the door, looking in. Clothes on the back of a chair. Open suitcase. Scattered shoes. Cosmetic bottles on the dressing table. A soft black brush with a wooden handle, for applying face powder.

  As time passed, she got bolder. After a few days, she would go right into the room, and soon she was looking freely at everything, touching and appraising objects. She even slipped her feet into a pair of shoes one day. (They turned out to be much too big for Claire, which surprised her.) She was always careful to leave everything in the same apparently random position she had found it, for it would have been embarrassing had Nuala realized what she was doing. There was a bottle of perfume. Paloma Picasso. Claire smiled when she saw that. She took the lid off and sniffed; would have liked to spray some on her wrist, but that would have been too risky. A toy rabbit. A diary. It never entered Claire’s mind to open it and read it. Whatever she was looking for in Nuala’s room, it wasn’t the sort of knowledge she would find there.

  It would have been hard for Claire to explain what she felt, looking around that austere room, and she wondered how Nuala saw it. How to express or explain that strange combination of longing and mystery she found in other people’s possessions, and which she suspected had something to do simply with the fact that they belonged to other people? And it wasn’t just the objects themselves, it was the whole atmosphere of the abandoned room, which another person had just left. What did all these things mean to Nuala? Some of them she would have considered insignificant, others would have been of great importance to her. Claire suspected that the cloth rabbit probably fell in the latter category.

  She picked it up and sniffed it. The sense of smell is greatly underrated. The rabbit gave off that musty, milky smell of babies or very small children. It was a bit grubby, but intact: no ripped ears or missing tail. It was evident that the child to whom it belonged loved it very much, perhaps it was her favourite toy. Claire imagined that Nuala’s little girl was the most important person in her life, that she probably loved her as she had never loved anyone else. Sometimes she would think of how, in the past, she would not have believed such a love to be possible. Such concern for her. She’s delicate. Perhaps. Vulnerable. But she would also remember how much she meant to her, and somehow this smallness and importance would seem incompatible. It would be frightening to have one’s whole life fixed upon so small a point. What would she do if she wasn’t there? She’d be lost without her. Her sense of herself would have no centre, she would be adrift. The more she cherished her the more this feeling would grow. Claire imagined Nuala creeping into the nursery at night to look at her while she slept. She would do this to check on her, to make sure that she was still breathing. Leaning over the cot, gently, so as not to wake her she would pick the cloth rabbit up by the ear, and look at it. The cloth rabbit, having no choice because of its fixed stare, looks straight back, and the very smallness of the rabbit would make anyone want to weep. Because size, you see, is important. How we react to things is often triggered principally by the dimensio
ns of the object …

  ‘Did you bring any photographs of the baby with you?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Would you like to see them?’

  ‘Very much.’

  Nuala went to her room, and brought down an envelope of photos, which she poured over the sofa. ‘They’re all mixed up. I just put them in at the last minute. Look, this one was taken in the hospital, the day after she was born.’ There were others that had been taken in Kevin’s and Nuala’s house in Monkstown, and looking at them, Claire was more aware than ever of how spartan and uncomfortable her own home must have seemed to Nuala.

  ‘Look at us,’ Nuala said, passing Claire a photo of herself with Kevin and the baby. ‘We look like we’re advertising life insurance.’ Claire was taken aback both by the remark itself and the coldness of her tone.

  ‘I haven’t looked at these since I got here,’ Nuala said, staring hard at another picture. ‘It feels funny looking at them, it seems like such a long time since I was there, but it’s only – what, three weeks now?’

  ‘Yes, just that.’

  Nuala picked up another photo of the baby asleep in her cot, and looked at it in silence for a long time. Being so deeply absorbed, she didn’t notice how interested Claire was in the photographs where Kevin appeared. They hadn’t met since they were at college together, and she was curious to see how much he had changed over the years.

  ‘I do miss them,’ Nuala said suddenly.

  ‘I’m sure you do,’ Claire said.

  ‘You must believe that. I’d hate it so much if you or anyone thought I was selfish coming away here and leaving them in Dublin, especially the baby. Sometimes I’m really lonely for them.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter what I think, or what anybody thinks,’ Claire said. ‘You have to do what you believe to be right.’ Nuala nodded, but looked uneasy.