I didn't have to give this account of myself at all. I don't know why this story insisted on being told. Partly, I think something was dislodged in me by the evidence given about his childhood at Brendan O'Donnell's trial for the murder of Father Walsh and Imelda Riney and her little boy.
His sister told of the brutality Brendan saw - he saw his father smash his mother's false teeth with a blow, and the mother trying to jump from the car and Brendan screaming at her not to jump. He saw the father's incessant beatings. His mother - who was well until her marriage - broke down. Mother and son huddled together so close that she went to school with him to stand in the corridor, until Brendan could let her go. This evidence wasn't even printed in the Clare Champion, the local paper. The waters closed over yet another Irish family. My two brothers in England had their life's chances taken from them in childhood, as surely as Brendan O'Donnell had. Maybe that trial brought me into the presence of my own sorrow and anger.
Or - maybe that's just fanciful. Maybe what matters is that it was a few days before last Christmas when I surprised myself by offering to write an introduction to this selection of columns [Are You Somebody?] Christmas is a time - when powerful feelings are stirring. And this was going to be my first Christmas completely on my own. Ever. There wasn't even a special person whom circumstances had prevented me from sharing the day with. Since Nell [McCafferty] and I had parted, there was no such person. I wasn't absolutely alone, of course - I'd be speaking to some of my sisters on the phone, and people would ring me. But I had no person of my own. In my fifties. I kept coming up to this blank fact and looking at it. It wasn't that I was unhappy. But I kept on thinking - sometimes surprised, sometimes just making a note of it, sometimes panic stricken -
"You're on, your own. You're on your own.
What happened? ...
How brave widows and widowers are! How resourceful people are, and how many secrets, they carry around with them! It is not about sex, the desire to share with another person. But it is about creation. Even though what "together" means is a mystery. I stayed in a village in the Pyrenees last autumn. It was small, quiet. In the evenings, in the square outside the church, a few teenage boys and girls played a kind of badminton. They played as the dusk came down, calling out softly, until it was too dark to make out the glimmering white shuttlecock. The event wouldn't have been different if there had been a person with me, glancing out through the windows of the hotel. But it would have been a whole: us there; it happening. Instead of a fractured thing with me, by myself, knowing that my solitary self was observing this lovely scene.
When I stay with the couple who are my closest friends, I hear them laughing and talking in bed, and sometimes in the middle of the night one of them goes down and makes tea, and when the clock goes off in the morning, they're at it again, talking away.
What happened to me?
Nuala spent that first Christmas Day alone in 1995 walking across the Burren in Co Clare.
The dog [Molly] leapt and bounded into the landscape crackling with frost, brilliantly bright in the winter sun. It isn't possible not to be thankful with all your heart for such a high blue sky and such a sweep of sparkling valley. How wise I was to be there! But underneath I didn't believe in my own wisdom. While loving what I was doing, I didn't believe in it. "How can I be so sensible?" I thought. "Will I be able to keep all this positive stuff up? What will happen next year?"
What happened, to make contentment so precarious? I've been trying here to understand the way things have worked out in my life. And though what I've written is personal, part of my predicament is general. The challenges of middle age, and the challenges of loneliness which I know exist even within relationships - confront many more people than me. Just as the same place I grew up in and the same influences I came under affected more people than me. Teachers used to say, "Miss Noticebox! You're nothing but a noticebox!" But when adults slap children down, and tell them not to be drawing attention to themselves, what are the adults doing? Why do they want the child to stay quiet and go away? Single middle aged women aren't supposed to kick up, either. Who wants to know about them? If no companion depends on them? If they're nobody's mother? Nobody's wife? Nobody's lover? If they're not famous or powerful? My problems are banal only because so many people share them.
The time and the culture I grew up in proposed to me that somewhere in the creation there was another person - my other half - walking towards me. That person would catch sight of me. But a woman, past the age where she might be contemplated as a sexual partner, is hardly seen. She turns into a silhouette. Nobody scrutinises her detail. She could become a "character" - in Ireland, anyway. But being vividly watched, because you might at any minute make everyone laugh, is a parody of being watched because you are desired.
I met two old ladies in a train in California, on the first leg of a long journey. They were on a frank, not to say raucous, quest for husbands. In Ireland you're not meant to mention love, after a certain age. Yet life teaches you to value love more and more. Human love, if you can secure it. And if you can't, you must hope that other loves will bring you through to the end - for a house or a garden, or a country, or a job increasingly well done, or money, animals. But how can you confer on those the status that loving a person has?
I would have been a very bad mother, during most of my life. But I'd be a good mother, now. Too late. Sometimes I have to look away from small children - hopping where they stand as their mothers try to put on their little jumpers, or talking to themselves dressed against the window in the beat in front of me in the bus, they are too beautiful to bear.
Then again, I see what is done to them. Last year, on an elegant beach in the south of France, I saw a father dangle a terrified little boy at the water's edge ducking him into the waves. Sometimes, after an episode like that, exhausted by my own cowardice as well as by pity and anger, I think, truthfully, "I just want to be finished with everything." But mostly, the life force inside cries out.
The world looks at middle aged women and talks about sexual frustration. But, what is it that has been frustrated? Is it that a woman's life is bracketed by two hormonal tides, and that one goes out, in middle age, and she runs down the beach after it? Is it that the children she hasn't had are calling out within her? It feels so like the body asking for something to begin. It doesn't feel like a farewell. People say without thinking, "Oh, what she needs is sex." That would be a fine distraction. But the longing is in the head and the heart as well as the body.
The remembered fluency with another person, the remembered ease with the self, the complexities of the imagination at last in perfect balance - that's what there is to regret. I went through a time, three or four years ago, when I saw love everywhere. I saw two handsome, middle aged tourists - Italians, perhaps - in white macs, start to run, laughing, with their arms around each other, when a shower of rain blew down Nassau Street. I saw a middle aged man I work with drop a kiss on the top of the head of his middle aged wife as they waited to cross Eden Quay. I wanted someone who had known me when I was young to trace the lines that had come on my face with tender familiarity. An as well, I wanted to be mad bout someone. I wanted more time! And I wanted time to be wiped out, the way it used to be! Time. I note every day the physical detail of middle age. The transparent polyps that have formed on the skin of my neck. The first white hair in my eyebrows. Pigment spots on my midmiff, which will never tan again. I see people my age cherishing their parents. No service they can offer is too much. If my mother had got old and I had been able to love her, would I be able to love my own ageing body now? If I had children? How do people arrange to love their ageing selves?
Colette was in her seventies "when she wrote: "Love, one of the great commonplaces of existence, is slowly leaving mine. The maternal instinct is another great commonplace. Once we've left these behind, we find that all the rest is gay and varied. But one doesn't leave all that behind as and when one pleases
I can't agree with her (not yet, not yet) that life without love is "gay and varied". The new genre of middle aged women's writing insists in a hectic way on the delights of the post menopausal condition. We are to become benign switches. But this is meaningless to me. I went to a talk Germaine Greer gave in Dublin a few years ago, hoping to be inspired by her vision of new access to vitality around the age of fifty. The lecture theatre was packed with women just as eager as I was, I presume, to listen to someone who spoke to our biological and cultural condition. It was worth going, if only to look at her, because she is so handsome and assured. But she chose, as prima donnas do, to confound expectations. She gave a rather dull academic talk. I want a more plausible prophet. I want to believe that old age is not to be dreaded.
Luckily, in real life, little things make people very content. I see it in the languor with which they answer the door, because they've been curled up in front of the television, or the eagerness with which they reach up to the shelf in a newsagency for the latest Gardening Weekly or The Gramo phone, opening it even as they queue to pay. People do not live in single states of mind. I'm as 9ft happy as not. And whatever it is I am lonely for, it is not for company. I have Yeats's "company of friends" in my head. I have imaginary companions as real as the girls at the Dunnes. Stores checkouts, or the man next door, coming out onto his step for a smoke. "Bookworm", they used to say at school. That's right. I've wormed my way in to what I've read and no one can ever shake me out.
Perhaps places are for me what books were for my mother? They are altogether full of promise. They assuage some of the regret for all the lives I never had.
What is out there will be my partner. What I write about it will be the record of the relationship. Where I sat above the Atlantic, last Christmas afternoon, turns out to be almost an illustration. Behind me, up in the Burren, nothing knitted together. There's a pre historic burial site. There's a village abandoned in the Famine.
There's a tiny twelfth century church. There's a holy well. There's a mound of shells near a cooking pit. Each thing is itself, discrete. Near each other, and made from the same material, but never flowing into each other. That's how the life I have described here has been. There has been no steady accumulation: it has all been in moments.
But in front of me there is a vista - empty, but inexpressibly spacious. Between those two - landscape of stone, and wide blue air is where I am.