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

years, having believed it was something that had belonged to Luke alone. He was dead for more than a decade. She had trained herself in the early years of losing him not to miss him or give him a thought. On this and other visits to Dublin since his death, she had kept him out of her mind. But she had not bargained for what she had just seen, the core of his personality, what she remembered most about him, appearing again as a part of life.
    She was busy for the rest of the day with meetings and then, since she was too tired to go downstairs, she had her supper in her room and read for a while before falling asleep. In the morning, as arranged, the car took her to the studio; on the way she marked the scenes in the script where she thought she might heighten the colour, but she would make no final decisions on this until she spoke to the director again. She would need, in case he was against the idea, to make sure that the studio could quickly change the previous plans, but she believed that if she saw the director on his own and was absolutely clear about what she had in mind, then he would not be opposed to what she would suggest.
    She had not dreamed in the night and had woken fresh, ready for work, so it was only now in the car as a drizzle settled over south Dublin and the strong coffee she had taken over breakfast started to kick in that the scene in the National Gallery came into her thoughts again. She had been with Luke for twelve years, but she had never lived with him. They had mostly met in New York, or London, or Paris. And his way of greeting her, or of seeing her to a taxi, almost tearful in the amount of tenderness he could offer, stood in for the domestic life they never had together.
    When he was not talking about his work – and she had loved these discussions with him, had loved his earnestness about the roles he played and how he prepared for them – then he was busy making her laugh. When they met, they drank and stayed up late, but she knew there was another side to him, that he was disciplined, a rigid timekeeper, that he was deeply committed to his life in the theatre, but oddly tolerant of directors and writers and other actors, as long as they had something he could work with, even if it was something that irritated him, or that he found difficult. He was, she knew, the best comic actor of his generation, and if he had been luckier, and maybe if he had not been Irish, she thought, he could have been better again, he could have played more serious parts. Somehow, the gap between the two – his immense talent and his sense that it would come to nothing except playing clowns and fools – had eaten away at him, and at her too, as the years went on, no matter how much he tried to play the hero for her in their time together, the time they snatched between jobs.
    A few times he came to Hollywood to act in Irish films and in a small part as an Irish-American barman and these visits might have appeared to other people, she thought, like the happiest times for her and for Luke. But they were not the happiest times, despite the parties and all the hours they could be with each other. How he worked affected Luke, as though work were a season and bit parts were a harsh winter, just as anything by Eugene O’Neill or Sean O’Casey would always belong to high glorious summer. She saw how easily he could become despondent and how hard it was for him not to show contempt when he felt it.
    Their happiest times, she thought, were spent alone in the dark with each other. His body was much stronger than it seemed. Sex excited him, or maybe it was she who excited him. There were nights in hotel rooms, nights when he had had a few drinks after a performance, nights when his own deep confidence in himself and a tender strength, things he kept mostly hidden, things he folded away wrapped in cynicism and self-mockery, were not afraid to appear. This was when she had loved him most.
    He was the sort of man, she thought,