Nothing is Black by Deirdre Madden

their house. That hadn’t changed over the years, whatever else had. Later on, she came to thehouse just to see him, not to visit his sister. She’d been his first real girlfriend, and neither of their mothers had been happy about it. They said they thought it was too serious, they were afraid they’d get married as soon as they left school, that they’d distract each other from their studies, and so on. The real reasons were that neither mother liked her child’s choice: Nuala’s mother thought Kevin was feckless because he was planning to go to art school, because he wasn’t as respectable as she would have wanted him to be. Kevin’s mother frankly told him she thought Nuala was ‘a minx’. ‘It’s not just that she always has to get her own way: it’s the way she manages to make it look like chance or other people’s doing that I don’t like,’ she said, an observation so astute that Kevin was taken aback when his mother said it to him. He’d lost his virginity to Nuala earlier that month: it had all been Nuala’s idea, but without anything in particular being said, she had been able to make it look like it was all his doing, and she had yielded to him, rather than the other way round. Like the prodigious chocolate consumption , it was a trick she could still turn, years later.
    Both sets of parents had been pleased when they went to college and happier still when the weekend visits cooled off and they gradually lost contact with each other and started seeing other people. They hadn’t even liked each other at that period, on the rare occasions when they met. She thought what he was doing was a childish waste of time. He loathed the clothes she now wore: stiff suits with shoulder pads and fake pearls, floppy bows at the neck of her blouses, the uniform of the business women whose ranks she wanted to join. Kevin thought it looked sterile. He didn’t think he couldhave anything in common with someone who looked like that.
    And yet as soon as they graduated they were together again within weeks. Before much more time had passed, they were planning their wedding, their house, their future life together. Kevin would never have claimed that he had drifted into marriage. ‘Drift’ was far too mild a word for the speed and velocity with which it happened . And it had never troubled him, never struck him as anything other than logical that it should be so.
    Only now, when there was so clearly something wrong in his marriage did he stop to consider it carefully, to think what it might be. He hadn’t kept Nuala down, he was sure of that. If anything, he had deferred to her, knowing her to be stronger and shrewder than he. Kevin didn’t mind admitting that all their success with the restaurant had been due to Nuala.
    They had both been doing reasonably well in the first years after they married. Nuala had been working with an insurance company in the city centre, Kevin had had a job in a commercial gallery. He would probably have been content to plod along in that way for years, but for a casual remark. They had gone out to dinner in a restaurant one night, and at the end of the meal, like countless other people before him, he’d said over the coffee and mints, ‘Wouldn’t it be lovely if we had our own restaurant?’ Afterwards, he couldn’t remember Nuala making any significant reply to this. It was a dream he had had for a long time, and he was disconcerted when Nuala came to him a week later, all briskness, with the facts and figures on a sheet of paper, announcing that having their own restaurant might wellbe a viable possibility. She had been to talk to their bank manager, had looked around at possible properties, had spoken to her father about a loan (Kevin wasn’t at all happy about that,) and was still engaged in looking at the restaurants already in operation in Dublin to see what gap there was in the market. When Nuala spoke of it, it all sounded so real that it frightened him. ‘But what if it