. These canvases were evidence of her obsession with someone, someone other than him. A dead man, someone he could never hope to compete with.
‘So you don’t… exhibit?’ he asked.
‘No. Why would I? This is for my own pleasure, no one else’s.’
‘Orla.’
She was back at it again, flinging thick gobs of pure viridian green on to the canvas, smearing it about with a pallet knife. ‘Hm?’
‘We have to talk.’
‘About what?’ She didn’t even look round.
‘About why you tense up when I try to make love to you. About that.’
Her shoulder stiffened; there was no other sign she’d heard him.
‘Orla.’
She turned to him then, brightly smiling; there was a smear of yellow ochre on her cheek.
‘It’ll come right in the end,’ she said.
But it went on like that: nothing changed. Rufus tried to make himself useful during the long days, and every evening he sat with her and watched TV with the old ones, seeing Haughey elected for a third term as Taioseach, and Thatcher visiting Moscow.
Often he awoke to find himself alone, hearing faint the hammer-drill of Guns N’ Roses or Deep Purple coming from the barn. He persisted, spending the nights with her whenever she’d allow it. But it was useless.
He’d heard of this sort of thing, he knew what it was called: vaginismus. The woman he loved, the woman he worshipped, had been hurt somehow in the past, hurt so badly that a normal response to a man was impossible for her.
He was going to talk to her about it. He had to.
But then something else happened, and that problem was pushed aside.
He was out in the grounds as autumn sailed in with fierce gusts of wind wrenching the leaves from the trees. He was muffled up warm and sweeping up piles of the things. In summer, the place was marvellous, but as winter approached it was rough being buffeted by gales. The moisture from the water hit the windows, caking them so that they were diffused, and from inside it was like looking through gauze, as if you were trapped in a bubble.
It was a cosy enough bubble though. The old folks were no trouble. And Orla… well, he loved her. They sat sometimes in the evenings when the old couple had gone to their rooms, just curled up together on the big sofa, chatting or watching TV, and he thought This is bliss.
Only, of course, it wasn’t quite. He no longer even attempted to make love to her. He could see she hated it, that her body rejected it utterly.
So… here they sat, like an ancient married couple, comfortable, not talking about it. But still it bothered him. He noticed things about her that worried him greatly. When she saw babies on TV adverts, she turned her head, looked elsewhere. When he kissed her, she pulled away. And he didn’t even try to sleep with her any more. She didn’t like it. That much was plain.