The Empty Family (6 page)

I missed home.

I missed home. I went out to Point Reyes every Saturday so I could miss home.

Home was this empty house back from the cliff at Ballyconnigar, a house half full of objects in their packages, small paintings and drawings from the Bay Area, a Vija Celmins print, some photographs of bridges and water, some easy chairs, some patterned rugs. Home was a roomful of books at the back of this house, two bedrooms and bathrooms around it. Home was a huge high room at the front with a concrete floor and a massive fireplace, a sofa, two tables, some paintings still resting against the walls, including the Mary Lohan painting I bought in Dublin and other pieces I bought years ago waiting for hooks and string. Home also was this room at the top of the house, cut into the roof, a room with a glass door opening on to a tiny balcony where I can stand on a clear night and look up at the stars and see the lights of Rosslare Harbour and the single flashes of Tuskar Rock Lighthouse and the faint, comforting line where the night sky becomes the dark sea.

I did not know that those solitary trips to Point Reyes in January, February, March, April, May, and the return with a car laden down with provisions as though there were shortages in San Francisco, I did not know that this was a way of telling myself that I was going home to my own forgiving sea, a softer, more domesticated beach, and my own lighthouse, less dramatic and less long-suffering.

I had kept home out of my mind because home was not merely this house I am in now or this landscape of endings. On some of those days as I drove towards the lighthouse at Point Reyes I had to face what home also was. I had picked up some stones and put them on the front passenger seat and I thought that I might take them to Ireland.

Home was some graves where my dead lay outside the town of Enniscorthy, just off the Dublin Road. This was a place where I could direct no parcels or paintings, no signed lithographs encased in bubble wrap, with the address of the sender on the reverse side of the package. Nothing like that would be of any use. This home filled my dreams and my waking time more than any other version of home. I dreamed that I would leave a stone on each of those graves, as Jewish people do, as Catholics leave flowers. I smiled at the thought that in the future some archaeologist would come to those graves and study the bones and the earth around them and write a paper on the presence of these stray stones, stones that had been washed by the waves of the Pacific, and the archaeologist would speculate what madness, what motives, what tender needs, caused someone to haul them so far.

Home was also two houses that they left me when they died and that I sold at the very height of the boom in this small strange country when prices rose as though they were Icarus, the son of Daedalus, warned by his father not to fly too close to the sun or too close to the sea, Icarus who ignored the warning and whose wings were melted by the sun’s bright heat. The proceeds from those two houses have left me free, as though the word means anything, so that no matter how long I live I will not have to work again. And maybe I will not have to worry either, although that now sounds like a sour joke but one that maybe I can laugh at too as days go by.

I will join them in one of those graves. There is space left for me. One of these days I will go and stand in that graveyard and contemplate the light over the Slaney, the simple beauty of grey Irish light over water, and know that I, like anyone else who was born, will be condemned eventually to lie in darkness as long as time lasts. And all I have in the meantime is this house, this light, this freedom, and I will, if I have the courage, spend my time watching the sea, noting its changes and the sounds it makes, studying the horizon, listening to the wind or relishing the calm when there is no wind. I will not fly even in my deepest dreams too close to the sun or too close to the sea. The chance for all that has passed.

I wish I knew how colours came to be made. Some days when I was teaching I looked out the window and thought that everything I was saying was easy to find out and had already been surmised. But there is a small oblong stone that I have carried up from the strand and I am looking at it now after a night of thunder and a day of grey skies over the sea. It is the early morning here in a house where the phone does not ring and the only post that comes brings bills.

I noticed the stone because of the subtlety of its colour against the sand, its light green with veins of white. Of all the stones I saw it seemed to carry most the message that it had been washed by the waves, its colour dissolved by water, yet all the more alive for that, as though the battle between colour and salt water had offered it a mute strength.

I have it on the desk here now. Surely the sea should be strong enough to get all the stones and make them white, or make them uniform, as the grains of sand are uniform? I do not know how the stones withstand the sea. As I walked yesterday in the humid late afternoon the waves came gently to rattle the stones at the shore, stones larger than pebbles, all different colours. I can turn this green stone around, the one that I carried home, and see that at one end it is less than smooth as though this is a join, a break, and it was once part of a larger mass.

I do not know how long it would have lasted down there, had I not rescued it; I have no idea what the life span is of a stone on a Wexford beach. I know what books George Eliot was reading in 1876, and what letters she was writing and what sentences she was composing, and maybe that is enough for me to know. The rest is science and I do not do science. It is possible then that I miss the point of most things – the mild windlessness of the day, the swallows’ flight, how these words appear on the screen as I enter them, the greenness of the stone.

Soon I will have to decide. I will have to call the car hire company at Dublin Airport and extend the time I am going to keep the car. Or I will have to drop the car back. Maybe get another car. Or return here with no car, just the mountain bike and some phone numbers for taxis. Or leave altogether. Late last night when the thunder had died down and there was no sound, I went online to look for telescopes, looking at prices, trying to find the one that Bill had shown me, which I found so easy to manipulate. I studied the length of time delivery would take and thought of waiting for this new key to the distant waves for a week or two weeks or six weeks, watching out from my dream house for a new dream to be delivered, for a van to come up this lane with a large package. I dreamed of setting it up out here in front of where I am sitting now, on the tripod that I would have ordered too, and starting, taking my time, to focus on a curling line of water, a piece of the world indifferent to the fact that there is language, that there are names to describe things, and grammar and verbs. My eye, solitary, filled with its own history, is desperate to evade, erase, forget; it is watching now, watching fiercely, like a scientist looking for a cure, deciding for some days to forget about words, to know at last that the words for colours, the blue-grey-green of the sea, the whiteness of the waves, will not work against the fullness of watching the rich chaos they yield and carry.

Two Women

As the taxi driver failed to notice that the lights had changed and seemed locked in a dull dream of his own, Frances wondered if it would be too rude to alert him, tell him he should move, get going. There was no car behind them to sound the horn impatiently; Dublin at six in the morning was a grey, empty place; it was the city she remembered and began to recognize once they had driven along the almost comically short motorway and were on the Upper Drumcondra Road.

What surprised her now was the speed with which she had resolved, on arrival at Dublin Airport, that she would never come here again, that this would be her last visit. The previous evening at JFK, on the other hand, she had found herself longing for Ireland, chatting with an Irish family as she waited to board; the idea that they were her people and that she was among them again had filled her with warmth. But now, as she was driven across the city towards her hotel, she felt that she was travelling through alien territory, low, miserable and grim. As long as she was open to such mood swings, she thought, then she must not be old.

It was important to behave briskly in the hotel lobby, keep an eye on all her bags and set her jaw firmly as though she were about to make a difficult decision. She had paid for the night before in case they would not have her room ready and she reminded the receptionist of this as the young woman fumbled with the keyboard of the computer, unable to find her reservation.

She pointed to the sheet of paper on the counter.

‘Rossiter, Frances,’ she said. ‘The name is Rossiter. Look under R.’

As the woman glanced up at her, Frances knew how intimidating she could be, and she made no effort to hide the hard impatience for which she was known by those who had worked with her over the years.

The receptionist finally found the booking and handed her a card to fill out, which she did quickly, almost perfunctorily.

‘Do you have luggage to take to your room?’

‘Yes, it’s here. Can it be brought up immediately?’

She kept close to her the large briefcase full of her drawings and specifications and made sure that she carried this herself. And once she was installed in the room she knew what to do – a quick shower to wash the grime of the night’s flying from her, fresh clothes left out on the chair beside the bed, and then darkness, lying there pretending that she was young and it had merely been a long night out somewhere and she had fallen home at dawn. In five or six hours she would be ready for a new day and her first meeting.

At one o’clock, when Gabi, the young woman who was to be her assistant, called from the lobby, she was dressed and had made out a list of the things they would need to discuss. Having told Gabi to come up, she moved the tray of half-eaten food from the sitting room table of her suite and placed it outside the door. She checked herself in the mirror knowing that Gabi would, in all likelihood, never before in her life have worked with a woman almost precisely halfway between seventy-five and eighty. Since she was old, she thought, it was her duty to look busy and bright.

Once Gabi arrived in her room it struck her that the scene being enacted was directly from a script. Gabi was fascinated by the size of the suite, the view over the Green, and then told her how much she admired her work and how many people in Dublin envied her for getting the job as assistant to such a famous designer.

‘I am not a designer,’ Frances said. ‘I dress sets. Now we have to concentrate because we have problems.’

‘I just didn’t think they had suites this big,’ Gabi said. ‘Do you always get a suite?’

‘I always get down to work as soon as I meet anyone. That’s what I always do.’

‘I know,’ Gabi said. ‘I checked you out.’

The director wanted certain colours but he could easily change his mind, she told Gabi, as the film was being shot. Some of his ideas, she was sure, would not work. And what she needed to do now was to make clear to Gabi how quickly they would have to move were the director to want something else, and to find out how hard this might be in a small country where films of this scope and ambition were seldom made.

‘The studio will have most things,’ Gabi said. ‘It’s not bad.’

‘Not bad is no use. We’ll have to go there as soon as I have spoken to a few more people and find out for ourselves. Can you drive?’

‘No.’

‘The studio must have a driver it uses. Tell him to call for me tomorrow at ten. And phone the people at the studio in advance and tell them I’m coming. I’ll need the person who actually controls the place, I have his name somewhere, for about two hours. You be there before me. And tell them no reception committee.’

‘Just down to work?’ Gabi smiled at her almost mockingly.

‘No tea, for example,’ she replied. ‘Or coffee or anything like that.’

‘And toilet breaks?’

‘I hate people going to the toilet,’ Frances replied. They both laughed.

What worried her most was the scene in the pub that the director wanted. The director used to be young, she smiled at the thought as she opened the set of drawings she had carried with her, but now he was no longer young. But he was not old enough to know that you got nothing extra from using a real pub, no matter how quaint and full of atmosphere, instead of a studio-built pub. A set, she knew, just needed a few spare props that suggested something; with a real pub you would have to spend hours removing objects that suggested too much, and painting over colours that seemed faded to the eye but would jar once bright lights and a camera were shone on them.

She had never once argued with a director, and would not argue now. She would listen, take notes, think carefully and arrange as much as she could in advance, then she would get down to work, and when it was ready she would stand out of the way to allow the real work to happen. By the time the film was made, most people would have almost forgotten who she was; she could linger in the shadows at the final party, having made one or two friends, and maybe three or four enemies.

Besides her career, nothing interested her now except her own house and her own mind. She had no interest in cities; even Dublin, where she had been brought up, seemed a miasma of disconnected shapes and figures with which she had no involvement. She would see her niece Betty, now already a middle-aged woman, in Killiney on one of her last days here, and maybe her niece’s grandchildren, and this would be a sweet time because they had no emotional pull on her and had enough money and would want nothing from her.

She had, in any case, told her niece years before what would happen to her money and her house in Los Angeles when she died. Betty had seemed almost relieved. She had appeared genuine in her approval of the plan.

Frances called them her neighbours now, but they were not her neighbours, they were the family who looked after her and lived in a cottage in her garden that had been, at her expense, extended many times.