Nothing is Black

by Deirdre Madden

  It had been strange for him to see Claire again. Only now could he admit how nervous he’d been about that. Once he knew Nuala was safe, for the remainder of the journey he’d been at least as preoccupied about seeing Claire as he had about seeing his wife. He had an image of Claire in his mind from over ten years ago, and he knew that when he met her again he would have to readjust that image. He didn’t want to see Claire looking older, more to the point, he didn’t want to see how she would react to an older version of him. And Claire had never been – how could he put it? – a comfortable person. She’d had a way of looking at you sideways that he had always found upsetting, and he had discovered this afternoon that she could still do it. She had changed much less than he expected. But he’d remembered, too, all the reasons why he had liked her so much in the past. He’d found himself thinking ‘What if?’ and Claire looking at him sideways, wordlessly telling him to forget it. It had been a relief when Nuala came timidly into the room.

  After the waitress cleared away their plates he said, ‘I don’t want to talk about why you went away – not tonight, in any case. There’ll be time for that when we get back to Dublin.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t have to go back just yet, do I?’

  ‘Of course you do,’ he said coldly, hurt at her reluctance to come home. ‘It’s too much of a responsibility to ask Claire to keep you here after what happened yesterday. She was more worried than you perhaps realize, but the main thing is that she thinks if you’re behaving like that, then it’s clear you’re not happy here, so there’s little point in your staying on.’

  ‘But I am happy! I am! I like it here. I’m not ready to go home yet.’

  ‘Well, it isn’t up to me, is it? You’ll have to talk to Claire about it. It’s her house, and she’s been exceptionally kind in having you to stay for so long already. But she is worried about the consequences of your being there.’

  ‘Nothing like yesterday will happen again, I promise it won’t.’

  ‘I’ve already told you, Nuala, it isn’t up to me.’ Kevin said. ‘If you have an promises to make, make them to Claire. The matter is out of my hands. It’s up to her whether or not she wants to let you go on staying with her.’ She wasn’t even trying to hide how eager she was to remain away from home. He called the waitress back, and ordered a black coffee and no dessert.

  ‘I think the least you could do would be agree to spend a little time with me. I want you to come down to Sligo with me for a night or two.’ He delivered this firmly. Nuala knew just how far she could push him. ‘That would be lovely. I like Sligo.’ Their marriage was, to a large extent, a complicated system of bargain and compromise, the rules of which Nuala understood implicitly, even if she didn’t always abide by them. She’d known he wouldn’t like this part of Donegal. No, they could do worse than go to some gentrified little hotel in Sligo for a night or two, she’d think of how she was going to explain herself on the drive there. She called over the waitress, and asked for some dessert.

  A glass-fronted trolley was wheeled to their table, and the waitress listed off the names of the confections it contained: chocolate mousse, pineapple gâteau, pavlova, fruit salad, crème caramel. Nuala chose pavlova. Was she doing this deliberately to annoy him, he wondered, as a huge helping of meringue was placed before her. The plate was scarcely big enough to hold it. There were few things Kevin thought more vulgar than large, inelegant desserts.

  ‘Yum yum!’ said Nuala, taking up her spoon. The waitress removed the trolley to the far side of the room. It was a quiet night, for a Friday in July, but the waitresses were glad enough of that. When things were slack, they would gossip in the kitchen and speculate about the customers. They all did it, but the girl who served Nuala and Kevin that evening had practically raised it to an art form. Her speciality was to make outrageous speculations about the people at the tables the other waitresses were on, and she’d pass on these wild conjectures between courses, so then the others would have trouble keeping a straight face when they went back for the dessert orders.

  They’d have died of embarrassment if they could have heard some of the things she said about them: not that she had any sympathy with them. That was the thing she really didn’t like about working as a waitress: you got to see the worst side of people. It would put you off humanity: certainly put you off getting married. Sometimes she felt sorry for people, but generally she thought it was their own fault. She looked across at the couple she had just finished serving, wishing the woman would finish her bloody pavlova and pay and go so that she could finish up and go home herself. They were definitely a married couple: she prided herself on being able to tell the ones that were really married, the ones that weren’t, and the ones who were pretending, who were there with people they shouldn’t have been with. This pair were no ad for wedded bliss, that was for sure. He looked nice: well, he would have looked nicer if he hadn’t had a face on him as long as a late breakfast. Could you blame him, married to her? You could tell just looking at her she was spoiled rotten, used to getting her own way all the time, and still not contented. What did people want out of life, anyway? They obviously had lots of money, for she had such beautiful clothes. You could tell a good thing by the colour as much as the cut, and that peachy shade of her linen jacket didn’t come cheap.

  The waitress narrowed her eyes and stared even harder at them. Sometimes she just invented crazy stories to make the other girls laugh, but she could also work out how things really were just by looking at people. This pair had been married not a long time, but not so recently either. Maybe seven or eight years at a guess. Long enough to feel really married, to have got to the point where security stopped being a relief and started to be a pain in the neck. It wasn’t that she was taking it for granted, it was different. Her sister was married, so she’d seen this sort of thing before. Nobody wanted to have a marriage that was shaky, ready to fall apart at any minute, but if it was too copperfastened, well, after a certain time you’d want to put it to the test, to sort of push against it, even kick against it, to see how far you would have to go before something gave. And she’d have bet her week’s wage that that was what was happening here, that this spoiled brat was running rings around her husband, rocking the boat just for the sake of it. But if push came to shove, she’d be the first to cry off: if she pushed him so far that he said, ‘It’s over, let’s go our separate ways,’ you could be sure she wouldn’t like it. The tears there would be then, the fuss she’d make. No, she didn’t understand life. She knew how it operated, but she didn’t understand it. Did anyone, though?

  Kevin and Nuala had finished their meal, and signalled to the waitress to bring them their bill. After they’d gone, she moved to clear the table. They’d left her the biggest tip she’d had all season. She wondered if this was to make up for the fact that they’d taken the pepper pot with them. No, she’d never understand what went on in people’s heads, not if she lived to be a hundred.

  12

  ‘MAMMY, WHY IS BLACK BLACK?’

  ‘Because it isn’t white.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Justice, child, give over with your questions!’

  But Claire didn’t give over. Throughout her childhood she persistently asked such questions, not to be difficult or contrary, but because she genuinely wanted answers. The subject of colour was important to her even then. Her mother gave her short shrift especially when she demanded to know the colour of people’s souls. Her father took it all more patiently. Claire remembered how he would listen to her with an air of great seriousness, his lips pursed, as he tried not to smile at some of the things she said.

  ‘Daddy, why have some birds got blue eggs and some speckledy eggs? How many colours are there in the whole world? Is there a word for the colour a shadow is? Why is grass green? Is white really a colour?’

  Her parents both agreed that she would keep a nation going.

  She liked the words for the colours: yellow, green, red. Then she learnt new words. Turquoise, ve
rmilion, aquamarine. Ochre, crimson, puce. This love of colour did not diminish as she grew up. The questions never ended, they became more complex, the only difference was that she stopped going to her father for answers to them. She was sitting in the studio reading Frida Kahlo’s notes on colour.

  BROWN: colour of mole, of the leaf that goes. Earth.

  YELLOW: madness, sickness, fear. Part of the sun and of joy.

  COBALT BLUE: electricity and purity. Love.

  BLACK: nothing is black, really nothing.

  ‘Daddy,’ she’d said when she was eight, ‘why do people keep saying the sky is blue, when it almost never is?’ He’d laughed aloud at that.

  Claire remembered this, turned the page of her book and savoured the silence not just of the studio, but of the whole house. It made her happy to know that she was alone. She somewhat regretted now that she had told Kevin that Nuala could come back on Sunday night to stay until the end of August as had been originally agreed. She had stipulated though that the situation would be – how had she put it? – ‘constantly under review’, yes, that was it.

  She’d discussed this with Kevin in a whispered conversation over breakfast that morning, while Nuala was still upstairs, preparing to leave with Kevin for Sligo. Claire didn’t like having to speak so quietly in her own house; it didn’t seem right, but she was anxious that Nuala should not hear what she was saying. Claire had lain awake for a long time the night before wondering just what she should say about Nuala staying on. In one way, she just wanted to see the back of her, but she also felt an inexplicable pity for both Kevin and Nuala, and found she couldn’t bring herself to be hard on them. But there had to be strict conditions. Looking over at the door, anxious that Nuala would come in at any moment, Claire leaned across the table and said quietly, ‘She can come back if she wants. I made a promise, and I don’t like to go back on it.’ As Kevin started to murmur his thanks, she added hurriedly, ‘But you must promise me this. Nuala mustn’t know that she can come back until late on Sunday. If she asks, just tell her I haven’t made my mind up yet. However, I can tell you now that when you phone me on Sunday afternoon, I’ll say yes. It’ll be best that way.’ Kevin looked puzzled, but he nodded and thanked her.

  Claire cut another slice of bread, pleased that they had discussed the subject and that she had made her views known. She simply didn’t want Nuala to take her hospitality for granted. ‘Keep her guessing until the last minute, that’ll teach her,’ she thought. ‘And can you make one thing clear to her: any more fun and games like the other night, any more disappearing acts and you won’t have to come and fetch her, because I won’t wait long enough for you to get here. She’ll be on the first bus out of town.’ Kevin nodded miserably, and suddenly she felt sorry for him again. She offered him more tea, but he shook his head.

  ‘Kevin, while you’re away, think hard about Nuala’s being here, about whether or not this is the right thing to do,’ she urged him. ‘Sometimes I’m not at all sure that Donegal is the best place for Nuala right now. Talk to her about it.’

  ‘I’ll try to,’ he said.

  The kitchen door opened at that point, and Nuala came in. Claire saw them off a few moments later, telling them she hoped they would have a great weekend, trying to keep the irony out of her voice. The emptiness of the house after they’d gone was as novel as it was delightful.

  No, the sky wasn’t blue and the sea wasn’t blue either, and often the grass wasn’t green. What colour was ice? Water? The sun? This morning it was colourless, a circle of pure light in a white sky. ‘Daddy, do you think white is as frightening as black? I do.’

  This morning, she wished she had enough money to buy the house where she was living. Up until now, she had had no interest in buying property: still didn’t, if she thought it through. Buying would be a declaration of how committed she was to staying in Donegal, rather than a desire to settle down and build a little domestic empire around herself. When Claire moved in, there’d been a small pane of glass broken in the back door. She’d nailed a board over it, and three years later, she still hadn’t got round to having the window mended. But even if she bought the house, it didn’t necessarily mean that she would then fix it, or that she would do something about the kitchen cupboard that had to be kicked before it would open, or any of the other malfunctioning fixtures and fittings. No, she’d never wanted a house, never even wanted to own things. Once they began to accumulate to any serious degree they made her feel nervous so that she had to get rid of them. Maybe it would be the same if she bought the house, she would immediately feel restless and trapped. Anyway, it was all hypothetical: she wouldn’t buy it because she didn’t have enough money. Maybe it was just as well.

  From things Kevin had said, she realized he thought she already owned the house. She didn’t say anything to disabuse him of the notion. Kevin would have found it incredible that someone could get to Claire’s stage in life and not have bought a house, even if it was only a small, draughty, isolated one.

  She thought of Giacometti, shocked out of domesticity for ever by an early confrontation with death. It began with a chance, brief meeting on a train with an elderly Dutchman. Later he attempted to, and, amazingly, succeeded in tracing Giacometti through a classified advertisement in a newspaper. They planned a journey together to Venice, but had scarcely set out when the elder man fell ill and died. Giacometti was twenty. The horror he felt on seeing the transition from being to nothingness would never leave him. In the face of certain annihilation, the clutter of domesticity was, to him, a monstrous lie. Why pretend life is anything other than transitory? Why pretend you are anything other than utterly alone in your existence?

  Oh, she knew the answer to that all right: because the lies were necessary, because to face the truth was just too damn hard. Because you need Giacometti’s courage to bear that sort of knowledge with the integrity he had shown, and the courage is much rarer than the knowledge. What Giacometti learned when his travelling companion died was not such a secret. Claire found it out the night Alice died, and Alice herself had known it all along. She remembered the moon, full over the cold, still peaks, remembered the following morning when she awoke to a strange combination of sorrow and elation. Everything she saw that day was charged with fragility and tenderness: the faces of strangers in the streets, the white mountain houses, the cats that slept on their steps, the pale cattle that were driven through the streets of the village at dusk …

  It had been strange and sad to see Kevin again. Her first impression was that he looked older than she had expected. He was only in his early thirties, but could easily have passed for ten years more than that. What had ravaged him? Nothing, she discovered with surprise when she looked at him more closely. He was glazed with money, that was the problem. The elegant well-cut clothes, the gold watch, the good accessories all conspired to put years on him. Physically, he was in good shape. It was his mind that had grown old. Her mother would have said that he looked ‘highly respectable’. She’d have been right.

  Looking at him, Claire wondered not why he had given up painting, but why he had ever concerned himself with it at all. Alice had always had her doubts about him. ‘When Kevin is thirty,’ she used to say, ‘he’ll have completely turned himself inside out.’ Claire hadn’t known then what she meant. She knew now. When he was actually sitting there before her, she found it hard to remember him as he was when she’d known him at art school. They’d had a lot in common then (or thought they had) and she was baffled by this stranger. The mysteries of one’s own past ideas and choices can be greater than the strangeness of other people’s choices and opinions. You expect to feel more sympathy and understanding with your own past self than is sometimes possible. He didn’t ask anything at all about her work, and she was grateful for that. She asked him about the restaurant with genuine interest, because Kevin and his job were so closely interrelated that you had to know about one to know about the other. She was glad when he said that it was going well; the opposite wou
ld have been worrying. It was a long time since she’d met someone whose whole sense of self was so closely bound up in their career, their possessions, their position in society: without them, she felt, he would be utterly adrift. They were sitting drinking tea, waiting for Nuala to come back from Anna’s house. ‘What are you thinking, Claire?’ he suddenly said. It was the most intimate question he asked her that day. To answer honestly she would have had to tell him, ‘I just don’t know how I ever thought I loved you.’ So of course, she told him a lie instead.

  What colour is happiness? Some people think it’s yellow, but it’s really pale blue. Depression: grey, not black, unless it’s really severe, in which case it’s red.

  He thought she was a failure. Nothing in particular had to be said for Claire to know that. There were several possible directions one could take upon leaving art college. A few people became successful painters, or went into related careers as photographers, designers or suchlike. Some became teachers. Others, like Kevin, accepted that they would make good only by forgetting about art and moving into an entirely different area: business or computing or whatever would bring prosperity. And then there were people like Claire who continued working for years at an art which brought them neither fame nor money, living in spartan rented rooms, always strapped for cash, their creative energy and intellectual curiosity as intense as ever. To Kevin it was pure folly. To Claire, it was life, and a good life.

  She knew that when Nuala left Donegal, it was unlikely that they would see each other again, in spite of Nuala having spoken about Claire coming to stay with them in Dublin. Nuala and Kevin having more money than Claire did make a difference, but it was just one strand in a complex web of social pressure and conformity which drew some people together and kept others apart. Like attracted like, the married gravitating to the married, those with children unconsciously seeking out their peers, everyone looking for the like-minded who would bolster them up and confirm their values, beliefs, fears and prejudices. Markus once said to her, ‘Take your yearly salary, and then dismiss the possibility of ever getting close to anyone who earns half as much as you, or twice as much as you.’ At the time, she had thought he was being cynical, but he had insisted he was right. ‘Never underestimate the force of social pressure. That’s what makes society run.’ No, she wouldn’t see them again. This was a period they would want to forget as soon as it had ended, and eliminating Claire from their lives would help them to that end.