Free Nothing is Black by Deirdre Madden Page A

half a dozen women claiming the same story. Oh yes, we all have our skeletons. Sometimes I wish we had the courage to bring it all out into the open, to stop pretending. But we never will.’
    By making friends with the local people, Anna felt she knew and understood more about the area, but in the mood she was in tonight, she could only see their confidences as isolating: they trusted her because she was an outsider. But what did it matter? She loved Donegal, and never regretted having bought her house there. She’d loved the place from the moment she arrived, just after Pieter’s death. They’d been living apart for such a long time, and after all they’d been through (or rather, after all he’d put her through,) she hadn’t expected that she would be greatly troubled by his dying. In her worst moments, she’d even thought that she would feel relieved, that she would be free of him at last.
    But she wasn’t relieved. She was devastated. Never for a moment had she thought they would get back together again, but she had hoped, even if only in some vague, half-formed way, that something would be worked out between them, that some day there wouldbe some kind of resolution. It didn’t happen. If he’d died in the early years of their marriage, just after Lili was born, before all the trouble, then it would have been different. Certainly she would have grieved for him, but it would have been a clean grief. There wouldn’t have been this feeling of bitterness, of failure, of unresolved rancour, all of which was compounded by a deep sense of loss. And she hadn’t expected to feel like this at all.
    She didn’t go to the funeral. Lili asked her not to: no, that wasn’t true, Lili told her not to go; asked her why she wanted to add hypocrisy to all her other faults and shortcomings. He died in the summer. Anna’s best friend Evelien had been about to leave for two weeks’ holiday in Ireland, and persuaded her to come too. She had rented a cottage and was going there by car, so there would be no problem in accommodating her.
    And so Anna left for Donegal. She had no idea which part of the country that was, for until then, Ireland was a place to which she had given no thought. She was glad that it was, for her, a neutral place. She expected little or nothing from the trip; it was to be nothing more than an escape from a difficult moment in her life.
    The only time Anna cried during her first visit to Donegal was on the last day, when she was putting her case on the roof rack of Evelien’s car. The thought that she might never see this place again was unbearable to her. They drove off, and at the first town they came to, she asked her friend to stop. ‘I’m not going back,’ she said. She spent another week in Donegal, and by the end of that time, had entered into negotiations to buy the cottage from the German family.
    Her idea at that time was that she would sell upeverything in Holland, and move permanently to Ireland. This had presented practical problems, and by the time they were resolved, she had changed her mind. She was glad now that the plan hadn’t worked out, for she knew that it would have been a mistake. She came for Christmas one year, but she didn’t enjoy it. It was dark and cold; and she felt isolated and lonely there for the first time ever. As she came to know the place better, she lost some of her illusions about it. There was malice and spite here too, if you cared to see them. It didn’t bother her greatly. Anna was more realistic than many visitors, and even felt relieved when she began to catch glimpses of the darker side of life she suspected must be there, for she knew then that she was really getting to know the place in which she had chosen to live. She now came to Ireland every spring, and returned to Holland at the end of the summer. It was a pattern which suited her perfectly.
    Sitting tonight in her kitchen, she thought of her apartment back in The Hague. She loved both her houses.