Free The Empty Family by Colm Tóibín Page A

arranged to spend a day together when her work on the film was finished.
    The director, with whom she had a progress meeting one day in the lounge of the hotel, looked more like an actor, she thought, oddly baby-faced but with a strange brutality about him. He seemed even more distracted this time than when she had seen him in Los Angeles and New York but distracted by his own dreams rather than the film he was about to shoot. It was only when she told him about the colours that she had in mind, emphasizing that some of them would be almost garish, that he grew attentive. He looked at her and nodded, but said nothing; suddenly, she saw, he had become interested in her.
    ‘But you’re really Irish, aren’t you?’ he asked.
    ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I worked in the Abbey before you were born.’
    ‘Do you like being back here?’
    His smile was almost cruel.
    ‘No,’ she said and looked at him steadily.
    Luke lost interest in her and that at the time was a shock. He still needed to talk to her, tell her what he was doing, or what work he was turning down, but when they met it was clear to her, once they were in the dark, that he did not want to make love any more. She sighed now at the thought that it had never occurred to her that as she grew older he would be happier to sleep close to her on the nights when they managed to be together, embrace her and sleep beside but not make love with her. And that he would also, on the nights when he was tense from working, be happier to stay in the bar with anyone at all rather than come to bed with her.
    She had not asked the director if he really wanted the pub in Wicklow used in the film; if he had changed his mind about it someone would have told her. But when she went to see it with Gabi she realized how hard it was going to be, so much would have to be removed, and there was so little space, and the owner, although he was being well paid, was grumpy and appeared uneasy in the presence of two women walking around discussing which pictures would have to be taken down, and how an entire wall would have to be painted.
    ‘It would be so simple to build this,’ Gabi said in a loud voice. ‘Wouldn’t it?’
    ‘Why don’t you then?’ the owner asked. He seemed wounded and then belligerent.
    ‘It’s a lovely place,’ Gabi said as Frances went to the window, ignoring both of them. ‘I’ve always heard about it but never been here. I just hope we’re not going to get in your way too much.’
    He did not reply at first and then asked if they would like a drink.
    ‘Not today,’ Gabi said.
    ‘On the house,’ he said as Frances turned around.
    They agreed to have a glass of beer each and sat near the window away from the owner until Gabi had to make a phone call and Frances was left with him as he moved up and down behind the bar like an animal long used to its cage. They did not speak. She was happy somehow when she had established for herself that there was nothing in him that reminded her in any way of Luke, that she was not going to go through Ireland finding middle-aged men who had something of Luke in them.
    But the end of their time together, how they both behaved, came to her now in this dimly lit space full of dust and old picture frames and faded paintwork; her feelings about what happened were tinged with regret, but not too much, more the sadness that it was all so long ago and that he was dead more than ten years and that she never saw him again after one night when he had not come back to the hotel room with her, but had stayed in the bar.
    She remembered that when she woke in the morning all those years before, she had realized that he had slept elsewhere, or not at all. And they had not made love for the first two nights of her visit, and this was her third night and there were two more left. She decided that if he had not returned by eleven o’clock that morning, she would check out and go back home and that she would not see him again.
    She remembered that