Free The Empty Family by Colm Tóibín Page B

she calmly watched the clock moving and began packing at ten and preparing to go, leaving his clothes strewn on the floor and his things in the bathroom. The room was booked in his name; he could, she thought, also pay the bill. It was a decision that, in its clarity and resolution, almost gave her pleasure, or perhaps it was pain, but she did not allow herself to feel pain, then or afterwards. She carried her bags to the lift at five past eleven and handed the key in at the desk, saying that her husband would be back soon but she must leave. And then she got a taxi to the airport and waited until there was a free seat on a plane home to the west coast.
    ‘Why are you smiling?’ Gabi asked. ‘You look like someone in love.’
    Frances sighed.
    ‘Dressing this pub for the film is going to be tough work,’ she said.
    When the phone rang night after night, she knew it was Luke but she did not answer. Each time she thought it might be him, she let the phone ring out and then took the receiver off the hook. She knew that he also rang Ito and Rosario but they were careful to say very little. And then she was busy with a film in Brazil and then had work in the studios. She did not go to New York or London or Dublin for a long time. He never wrote, but if he had written, she would not have opened a letter from him.
    She could not help following his career, however, because his Con in A Touch of the Poet won him a Tony nomination and his one-man show based on Eugene O’Neill’s father won him all the awards in both New York and London. She could not have avoided either the news of his wedding to a woman who had been an actress, Rachael Swift. They looked happy in the wedding photograph published in the gossip magazines. She was blonde, it was hard to tell what age she was. She told a reporter that now that she and Luke were married, she hoped never to leave his side.
    The only time in all the years when Frances felt regret over what had happened and wished she had kept in touch with him was when she heard the news that he had died. She would like to have been with him when he was sick, she thought. She knew that, no matter how happily married he had been, with her he had something he would not have forgotten, especially if he had had time to think about things at the end of his life. He would have thought of her, as she would of him. She would like to have touched his dead body, or maybe been at his funeral, but she was not sure.
    But it might have been easier, she thought, to have regretted nothing at all, except that certain things are inevitable, including the fact that he grew tired of her. It was all a long time ago, she thought, brought back into her mind by two porters in the National Gallery and the shifting clouds in the Irish sky.
    She did not have much time in the days that followed to think about anything except the film. She got up with the dawn and left nothing to chance; she worried about the lighting cameraman, who was too ambitious, too ready to establish his own style. Maybe she had made some of the sets look too ordinary, she thought, taken no risks with them. This man was all risk and brilliance, and she admired his daring but wished she had worked with him before so that she could know whether he got results only from sets that were as interesting in themselves as the sort of light he cast on them. He avoided her and she wondered if this was because of her reputation for being difficult or if he simply had no interest at all in consulting with her or asking her to make changes in what she was doing.
    Slowly, she became anxious to leave. The lowness of the buildings in Dublin, shops that were cheap imitations of larger and better stores in bigger cities, ways of dressing that were either shabby or pretentious, and ways of moving in the street that lacked alertness or any style, all began to irritate her. At the weekend, especially on Fridays, the hotel lobby and the bars filled up with drinkers, and once or