Free Nothing is Black by Deirdre Madden

than when the sun shone full upon them. They watched the grey clouds cover the peaks of the mountains, and the clustered villages became crowns of light in the dimness. As they rounded a curve in the path they startled some deer, which ran away and hid, shy and light, running in the dusk. And all the time she was thinking of Alice, of her having toleave life. The full moon shone that night, too. It had been there, blank white during the day, and they watched it fill with silver light as the dusk fell.
    Shortly after they got back to the house, Tommy rang to say that Alice had died some hours earlier.

8
    LESS THAN A QUARTER of a mile away, Anna was also passing a sleepless night. She went down to the white kitchen and made herself a mug of camomile tea. Herbal teas were one of the few things of which she brought supplies from Holland to Ireland every summer. She sat with her hands around the mug, waiting for the tea to draw and then cool sufficiently for her to drink it. Tonight for some reason the light, straw-like scent which she usually found so soothing made her feel slightly queasy. She was in a worse mood than she had pretended to herself. Acknowledging this, she poured the tea down the sink and made herself a hot whiskey instead.
    Anna hated insomnia, which she regarded as one of the most severe penalties of growing old. She had slept so well when she was younger, she remembered Pieter saying to her, ‘Sleep is your natural element.’ He used to get up in the middle of the night to feed Lili when she cried, and she wouldn’t hear him either leaving or returning to the bed. She’d wake in the morning still in a fug of drowsiness for a good hour or so after she got up, as if the night were something she couldn’t shake off. It had been particularly hard in Holland where everythingstarted at the crack of dawn; she’d always had to be up so early to get Lili out to school and herself ready for work. When she came to live in Ireland she regretted that she hadn’t lived there earlier, for in Donegal nothing much ever happened before ten in the morning. But, as was the case with many things in her life, it was too late by then. Now it took her so long to get to sleep and the slightest sound woke her. Tonight the wind had been blowing about the eaves, but that was nothing new. No, it was her own frame of mind that was keeping her from sleep, and that drove her down to the kitchen and to the whiskey bottle.
    To some extent she blamed Nuala, who had called to visit her that afternoon, and confided in her more deeply than ever before mainly on the strength of some Jenever which Anna had rashly produced for her to try, and for which Nuala had instantly developed a great liking. After three glasses she began to tell Anna more about her circumstances than Anna perhaps wished to know, Nuala growing lachrymose and self-pitying in the process.
    Ever since her adolescence, people had been confiding in Anna their secrets and problems. Sometimes it puzzled her that this should be so, and she wondered if she was, perhaps, more curious than she cared to admit. Did she, in all honesty, ask leading questions, did she pry? No, she didn’t. The irony of it was, Anna herself confided in no one. It wasn’t even that she chose not to do so: she really believed that she was incapable of opening her soul to another person. Such secrets as her friends blurted out to her in both Holland and Ireland were mild enough anyway: the familiar litany ofdrunken husbands, wayward children, long-held resentments against parents now old and dependent. Rita once remarked to her, ‘It’s foolish that you’re the only person around here who I can talk to like this. What do secrets like mine amount to anyway? There’s not a house round here where you wouldn’t hear the same, if they chose to tell you. If you got every woman in this parish together and made her write down the thing they were most ashamed of, and then read them aloud, I bet you’d have