Read Online The Empty Family by Colm Tóibín - Free Book Online Page A

low skies, the dingy city, the bleak landscape, faces locked in northern misery. Her director, the man for whom she was working now, had got away too, she surmised. He was interested in Ireland only as a subject, but the colours he wanted, the backgrounds, his customary way of turning the camera and editing film, were pure Italian when they were not French.
    She moved from painting to painting, especially the ones that depicted Irish scenes, studying the composition and the colour, which were French in style, and it made her remember her meetings in Los Angeles and New York with the director and caused her to wonder if she should not rethink the background colours she had chosen for certain scenes, have them bolder, wash any sense of Ireland out of them, so that the film might look more beautiful and much stronger. If she did it once, she would have to do it all the time, she realized. And then she thought no, it could be done using colours directly from some of these pictures, in a few key scenes, leaving the rest of the film starker. It would be a risk, but the director had told her that he wanted something stylish, and that his budget was high enough to pay for it and low enough not to need to make something for a mass audience.
    She would come back later with a notebook, and now, as she began to examine French scenes painted by Irish painters, she took in the happy tone of some of the compositions and the sheer beauty of the colours and she smiled to herself at the idea of how relieved they must have been on spring mornings and summer days when there was no drizzle or dark clouds approaching, or shifts in the light every two seconds. It made her wish to be back now in her own house in California, but glad she had been brought up in this country for long enough to appreciate being so far away from it.
    In one of the earlier rooms as she stopped in front of one of the paintings she had glanced at a uniformed porter sitting on a chair. When he had greeted her, she had returned the greeting briefly. He was a man in his early sixties, thin-faced, grey-haired, with bright eyes; he seemed happy in his job. Now, as she prepared to leave the gallery, she noticed him bustling by her, finding a colleague who was in the room adjoining the room where the Irish paintings done in France were hanging.
    She took in through the doorway the encounter between the two porters while pretending to study a painting closely. She was not able to hear what they were saying, but she could watch as the porter who had greeted her told the other porter something and the man listened with an absolute curiosity and a sort of glee. At times both men laughed even though the story, whatever it was, had still not ended. Some of it seemed unbearably funny to both of them, but then they became serious again as the man who was talking whispered the last part even though there was no one nearby. Finally, they stared at each other in mock wonder and surprise.
    They were too wrapped up in their exchange to notice that she had been watching them, and as the porter walked past her to return to his post, she averted her eyes and looked at the painting once more. What had come back to her suddenly was the single time in her life when she had been in love. The first porter’s face did not in any way resemble Luke Freaney’s face, which was much narrower. Luke was also a few inches smaller. His features were more irregular. But it was the lightness in the walk, and the way of speaking as though the slightest remark were a way of taking you into his confidence, the constant laughter and then the face, so vivid to her now as she remembered it, slowly becoming serious. All of it belonged to Luke. Perhaps, she thought, it was Irish, but he had brought it to a fine art and used it as a mask and made it into pure charm, something warm and loving, at the same time.
    And now she had seen it again, enacted by a porter in the National Gallery, not having seen it for thirty