Nothing is Black

by Deirdre Madden

  Alice’s background was similar to Claire’s, having grown up on a farm in Roscommon, but Claire could never understand how she could have come so far so fast. She seemed to have freed herself from her society at a remarkably early age. Like Claire, she had gone to the local convent school; unlike Claire, her rebellion against the religion she had instilled into her was not just a poorly thought-out reaction against authority, but a considered and deeply held position from which she would not be budged. While Claire thought there could be some value in religious ritual, Alice had dismissed it. ‘All or nothing. You’re just afraid.’ She considered that death was the end, and meant complete annihilation, a view which remained unaltered even when she fell ill and was told that she was going to die. But when Claire talked to their mutual friend Tommy about it after Alice’s death, he said, ‘Don’t ever imagine it was easy for her. Of course she was frightened. She might have liked to think that things could be other than they were, but she didn’t believe that it could be so, and she couldn’t pretend, simply to comfort someone, least of all herself. What Alice believed was bleak and she felt the bleakness of it, every day, right up to the end.’

  What this had challenged in Claire was the thoughtless faithlessness that she had drifted into when she was at school, and the full consequences of which she had never properly thought through. She couldn’t fully accept Alice’s view of things, but she wasn’t clear what a valid alternative might be.

  When Alice died, she left strict instructions that she didn’t want a religious funeral, even though it was difficult for her family to accept that. Claire was abroad when Alice died, and when she came back it was important for her to talk to friends like Tommy who had been there with her. He didn’t share her view that Alice’s integrity could only be admired.

  ‘You might not have thought that if you’d seen her mother at the funeral. It was in Dublin, it had to be, for she’d insisted on being cremated rather than buried, and they don’t have the facilities for that down the country. Her mother came to me after and she said, “I still can’t believe she’s gone, I don’t feel I’ve been to a proper funeral at all. I still haven’t had a chance to say goodbye.” It bothered her too, that she wouldn’t have a special place she could go to, to bring flowers and feel close to Alice. I just thought it was so wrong, Claire. You can be too pure, too high-minded, you know. Sometimes you have to compromise.’

  ‘I still don’t think it would have been right to have a Mass for her,’ Claire argued. ‘She was so at odds with that, so against it, that it just couldn’t be right.’

  ‘But Claire,’ Tommy replied, ‘funerals aren’t for the people who’ve died, they’re for the people who are left behind. Haven’t you grasped even that much?’

  She understood what he meant, but stubbornly refused to yield the point. She wanted to take the strict line on Alice’s behalf, and needed to do it for herself, to make what had happened bearable.

  Claire had been in Germany when Alice died. She’d been looking forward to seeing her again when she went back, for although she was ill, it was thought she would live for at least another six months. Then Tommy rang to tell her Alice had got much worse quite unexpectedly. He rang again three days later to say it could only be a matter of days. Claire had been with Markus at the time. He encouraged her to go out, not to take her mind off Alice, but just because that was what had been planned for the day, that they would go walking in the mountains.

  That afternoon, they came across a tiny church, with a graveyard. Some of the tombs had photographs, from many years earlier. Looking at them, Claire had a creeping horror that Alice was right about death. Claire went into the church, and was aware of the different qualities of silence. Outside, the peace of the mountains was full and inhuman, the more complete for being broken by the sound of the wind and the cries of birds. The silence of the chapel was brittle, unnerving: she wanted to laugh, even while this appalled her. It struck her as a dreadful thing to do. She stayed only for a few moments, in a stillness so complete that she felt she had somehow moved outside time, and this intimation of eternity appalled her.

  As they walked back down the valley to the house where they were staying, dusk was falling, and she had never seen the valley look so beautiful. After the sun went down, the colours of the trees and the grass suddenly became more vivid than when the sun shone full upon them. They watched the grey clouds cover the peaks of the mountains, and the clustered villages became crowns of light in the dimness. As they rounded a curve in the path they startled some deer, which ran away and hid, shy and light, running in the dusk. And all the time she was thinking of Alice, of her having to leave life. The full moon shone that night, too. It had been there, blank white during the day, and they watched it fill with silver light as the dusk fell.

  Shortly after they got back to the house, Tommy rang to say that Alice had died some hours earlier.

  8

  LESS THAN A QUARTER of a mile away, Anna was also passing a sleepless night. She went down to the white kitchen and made herself a mug of camomile tea. Herbal teas were one of the few things of which she brought supplies from Holland to Ireland every summer. She sat with her hands around the mug, waiting for the tea to draw and then cool sufficiently for her to drink it. Tonight for some reason the light, straw-like scent which she usually found so soothing made her feel slightly queasy. She was in a worse mood than she had pretended to herself. Acknowledging this, she poured the tea down the sink and made herself a hot whiskey instead.

  Anna hated insomnia, which she regarded as one of the most severe penalties of growing old. She had slept so well when she was younger, she remembered Pieter saying to her, ‘Sleep is your natural element.’ He used to get up in the middle of the night to feed Lili when she cried, and she wouldn’t hear him either leaving or returning to the bed. She’d wake in the morning still in a fug of drowsiness for a good hour or so after she got up, as if the night were something she couldn’t shake off. It had been particularly hard in Holland where everything started at the crack of dawn; she’d always had to be up so early to get Lili out to school and herself ready for work. When she came to live in Ireland she regretted that she hadn’t lived there earlier, for in Donegal nothing much ever happened before ten in the morning. But, as was the case with many things in her life, it was too late by then. Now it took her so long to get to sleep and the slightest sound woke her. Tonight the wind had been blowing about the eaves, but that was nothing new. No, it was her own frame of mind that was keeping her from sleep, and that drove her down to the kitchen and to the whiskey bottle.

  To some extent she blamed Nuala, who had called to visit her that afternoon, and confided in her more deeply than ever before mainly on the strength of some Jenever which Anna had rashly produced for her to try, and for which Nuala had instantly developed a great liking. After three glasses she began to tell Anna more about her circumstances than Anna perhaps wished to know, Nuala growing lachrymose and self-pitying in the process.

  Ever since her adolescence, people had been confiding in Anna their secrets and problems. Sometimes it puzzled her that this should be so, and she wondered if she was, perhaps, more curious than she cared to admit. Did she, in all honesty, ask leading questions, did she pry? No, she didn’t. The irony of it was, Anna herself confided in no one. It wasn’t even that she chose not to do so: she really believed that she was incapable of opening her soul to another person. Such secrets as her friends blurted out to her in both Holland and Ireland were mild enough anyway: the familiar litany of drunken husbands, wayward children, long-held resentments against parents now old and dependent. Rita once remarked to her, ‘It’s foolish that you’re the only person around here who I can talk to like this. What do secrets like mine amount to anyway? There’s not a house round here where you wouldn’t hear the same, if they chose to tell you. If you got every woman in this parish together and made her write down the thing they were most ashamed of, and then read them aloud, I bet you’d have half a dozen wo
men claiming the same story. Oh yes, we all have our skeletons. Sometimes I wish we had the courage to bring it all out into the open, to stop pretending. But we never will.’

  By making friends with the local people, Anna felt she knew and understood more about the area, but in the mood she was in tonight, she could only see their confidences as isolating: they trusted her because she was an outsider. But what did it matter? She loved Donegal, and never regretted having bought her house there. She’d loved the place from the moment she arrived, just after Pieter’s death. They’d been living apart for such a long time, and after all they’d been through (or rather, after all he’d put her through,) she hadn’t expected that she would be greatly troubled by his dying. In her worst moments, she’d even thought that she would feel relieved, that she would be free of him at last.

  But she wasn’t relieved. She was devastated. Never for a moment had she thought they would get back together again, but she had hoped, even if only in some vague, half-formed way, that something would be worked out between them, that some day there would be some kind of resolution. It didn’t happen. If he’d died in the early years of their marriage, just after Lili was born, before all the trouble, then it would have been different. Certainly she would have grieved for him, but it would have been a clean grief. There wouldn’t have been this feeling of bitterness, of failure, of unresolved rancour, all of which was compounded by a deep sense of loss. And she hadn’t expected to feel like this at all.

  She didn’t go to the funeral. Lili asked her not to: no, that wasn’t true, Lili told her not to go; asked her why she wanted to add hypocrisy to all her other faults and shortcomings. He died in the summer. Anna’s best friend Evelien had been about to leave for two weeks’ holiday in Ireland, and persuaded her to come too. She had rented a cottage and was going there by car, so there would be no problem in accommodating her.

  And so Anna left for Donegal. She had no idea which part of the country that was, for until then, Ireland was a place to which she had given no thought. She was glad that it was, for her, a neutral place. She expected little or nothing from the trip; it was to be nothing more than an escape from a difficult moment in her life.

  The only time Anna cried during her first visit to Donegal was on the last day, when she was putting her case on the roof rack of Evelien’s car. The thought that she might never see this place again was unbearable to her. They drove off, and at the first town they came to, she asked her friend to stop. ‘I’m not going back,’ she said. She spent another week in Donegal, and by the end of that time, had entered into negotiations to buy the cottage from the German family.

  Her idea at that time was that she would sell up everything in Holland, and move permanently to Ireland. This had presented practical problems, and by the time they were resolved, she had changed her mind. She was glad now that the plan hadn’t worked out, for she knew that it would have been a mistake. She came for Christmas one year, but she didn’t enjoy it. It was dark and cold; and she felt isolated and lonely there for the first time ever. As she came to know the place better, she lost some of her illusions about it. There was malice and spite here too, if you cared to see them. It didn’t bother her greatly. Anna was more realistic than many visitors, and even felt relieved when she began to catch glimpses of the darker side of life she suspected must be there, for she knew then that she was really getting to know the place in which she had chosen to live. She now came to Ireland every spring, and returned to Holland at the end of the summer. It was a pattern which suited her perfectly.

  Sitting tonight in her kitchen, she thought of her apartment back in The Hague. She loved both her houses. She’d been successful in her career as an interior designer and she’d enjoyed it. At least that had worked out. It was some compensation for all the personal unhappiness. Her marriage, her relationship with Lili: sometimes she could be philosophic about this side of her life, shrug, reason that she knew more people whose marriages had failed than had made a success of it. The hidden miseries her Irish neighbours told her were further proof that she was not alone in her unhappiness. But tonight those regrets had the upper hand, and she could do nothing to get them into perspective.

  It was three years now since she’d even seen Lili, and years again since the meeting before that. She’d looked quite different to how Anna had remembered her, looked older than she’d expected, with her hair cropped short in a style that didn’t suit her. It was a mild shock to see how much she’d changed, for it brought home to Anna how much of Lili’s life had passed in which she had had no part. Not that she wanted to interfere, as Lili claimed, no. She didn’t think she had a right to know everything that went on in her daughter’s life, but it did hurt to be so completely excluded from it. It wasn’t fair for Lili to blame Anna for every failure and lack in her life. It certainly wasn’t fair either to hold Anna exclusively responsible for the break up of her marriage to Pieter. That was the heart of the quarrel between Lili and Anna. She wanted to avoid talking about it on this visit, but feared that they would degenerate into wrangling about that very subject.

  ‘I’m so glad to see you again, it’s been too long, Lili. You look well,’ she lied. ‘How do you find me? I must look much older to you.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lili, ‘you do.’

  ‘I won’t always be here,’ Anna said evenly. Pieter had died so suddenly. She wanted to mend fences with her daughter if only to spare her the bitter, unresolved emotions she had experienced then. She still loved Lili enough to want her not to have to go through that; no, she’d not have wished such pain upon anyone, least of all her only daughter. But Lili had fixed ideas about her parents’ marriage.

  ‘Are you happy?’ Anna asked timidly.

  ‘Of course not,’ was the reply. ‘How can I be? Haven’t I told you time and again the upbringing you gave me left me so lacking in confidence and self-esteem that I don’t expect to ever find what you call happiness.’

  Anna knew she would have to reply carefully to this. What she wanted to say was that Lili was being ridiculous, she was a woman in her thirties, her destiny was in her own hands. No one was dealt the hand they thought they deserved in life, you just had to make the best of it. To blame your mother for your misery at Lili’s age was just wallowing in self-pity, as far as Anna was concerned. She had been a good enough mother, of that Anna was convinced. She had always given Lili her freedom and respected her independence. What did Lili want? That her mother live her life for her? Only by completely abdicating responsibility for her own life could Lili hold Anna to account. She didn’t say any of this aloud. Instead, she took a deep breath and said quietly. ‘One thing which you should always remember, and yet one which you always choose to overlook, is that I didn’t leave your father. He left me.’

  ‘But then he came back and you wouldn’t take him in.’

  ‘Why should I have done so?’ Anna was dismayed to see how quickly she was losing her temper, when she had wanted so much to stay calm. ‘Have you any idea what it’s like to have a man walk out on you like that? The man to whom you promised and devoted your whole life? Do you know what it’s like to have a child with a man, and then to have him humiliate you in the worst possible way, in front of all your family and friends?’

  When Lili was ten, Pieter had left Anna for his secretary. He was forty, Anna two years younger, and the secretary was nineteen. Anna hadn’t suspected a thing. She had thought they were happy together. One evening Pieter didn’t come home from work. He rang her later to say that he wouldn’t be home that night, that he wouldn’t be home again at all, except to collect his belongings. Anna felt she aged ten years that evening. She had never given a moment’s thought to getting older, had noticed slight, gradual changes in her skin, her body, as just that, changes, not as a deterioration of which to be frightened. She’d had nothing but contempt for women who at forty thought they should look as they did at twenty. After Lili was born, she was never as shapely as she’d been before, but she didn’t care. She was
proud of her body. The changes wrought by motherhood made her feel more womanly, not less. But then Pieter walked out on her for a teenager, and Anna felt he might as well have said straight out she was fat, old and ugly. She still knew she had been right in her earlier attitude, but the shock of his betrayal completely destroyed her self-confidence. She rebuilt her life, but she never got over that particular shock.

  ‘It was just a silly little fling, Mother, anybody could see that. I remember at the time, everybody told you it would just blow over. I’ve never understood why you took it all so seriously, it was just too banal.’

  ‘Banal!’ Anna shrieked, jumping up from her seat. ‘Don’t you realize what you’re saying? That’s what made it so humiliating for me. Why can’t you see that? Are you a woman at all, Lili, that I can’t make you see that?’

  ‘But then he wanted to come back and you wouldn’t take him.’

  ‘No,’ Anna said, ‘that isn’t true. It wasn’t that I wouldn’t take him back: I couldn’t. He had stayed away too long.’

  ‘Ten months! You call that long!’

  ‘Yes. Yes I do. You don’t measure that sort of time by the calendar. You can’t quantify pain like that. I spent those months hardening my heart just so I’d be able to go on living, and look after you. It was the only way I had to protect myself. By the time they got bored with each other and she kicked him out, it was too late. I couldn’t just forgive and forget and go back to being as we had been before. Maybe you can turn your heart on and off like a tap, but I can’t.’ She forced herself to be calm, and spoke quietly now. ‘My marriage failed because your father left me, not because I refused to forgive him. It was not my fault. I did everything I could to try to protect you, to lessen the hurt, but I had my limits. I think I gave you a good upbringing under the circumstances, but all you do is blame me. It isn’t fair. The troubles of your life are not my fault, Lili. Can’t you understand that? They are not my fault.’