It is hard to believe Nuala O’Faolain is dead four years. Four springtimes have sprung their dancing daffodils and dawn choruses since the writer of exquisite introspection slipped into eternity, peacefully in the end.
Nothing much has changed. The economy has got worse and tyrants are still slaughtering their peoples, but the sun did not crash to earth in a great apocalyptic fireball. Life goes on. Most of us still get up each day and pursue our familiar patterns, until our time, too, will come. I imagine Nuala would have felt that a personal insult.
“As soon as I knew I was going to die soon, the goodness went out of my life,” she told her friend, Marian Finucane, in a radio interview on April 12, 2008 that held the country spellbound, and which clawed at the taboo of death.
Excerpts from it are sprinkled throughout Nuala, Finucane’s 90-minute film which will be broadcast on RTE1 tomorrow at 9.30pm. They are as plaintive now as they were then. “It must look as if I’m an awful divil for publicity altogether,” Nuala, aged 68, said as a prelude to her announcement. “Now I’m actually dying. I have metastatic cancer in three different parts of my body.”
Listening to it again, Finucane’s restraint is remarkable. This was not the first time the pair had discussed looming death. Nuala had been godmother to Finucane’s daughter, Sinéad, and had helped her cope with her child’s impending departure from life with leukaemia. How Finucane must have had to fight the impulse to put her arms around her friend, to try to banish the terror strangling her husky, girlish voice and to tell her it would be okay.
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Instead, Finucane asked her friend, without a quiver betraying her own voice, if she believed in an afterlife and if she believed in God. “No,” said Nuala starkly, broking none of Voltaire’s black humour when asked on his death bed if he renounced Satan, and replied that this was no time to be making enemies.
At a screening of Nuala in Dublin last Wednesday night, not a cough nor a restless creak of a seat was to be heard.
The darkened cinema filled with Nuala’s voice and her ardent life: her love for her tuxedo-clad, philandering father, Terry O’Sullivan, the Evening Press social columnist; her two brothers dead from drink; her vivacious sisters so different and yet so alike; their mother’s daily inebriation from a concoction of beer and gin; the strains of Nuala’s beloved Mahler and her anguished quest for the secret to an ever-lasting relationship.
She had most cruelly treated those whom she had loved the longest. While dying, she gave instructions that she wanted no contact with Nell McCafferty, the Derry-born journalist with whom she had lived for 15 years. Her second-most-enduring lover was Tim Hilton, an English art critic with whom she had 10 on-off years and whom she jilted on the eve of their planned wedding.
The final credits rose, recording that McCafferty and Hilton had declined to take part. When it was over, the applause sounded as muffled as faraway weather and when the lights came on it was clear why. Face after face glistened with tears.
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They were not sentimental tears. They were tears of loss and empathy, and much self-recognition. Before the lights had gone down, Finucane had told the audience that Nuala was a metaphor for Ireland. And, yes, there we were in that jamboree of contradictions: a feminist who worshipped her womanising father; an impoverished family behind its respectable hall door, hostages to the culture of a misogynistic Catholic dogma; the pretence that the overconsumption of alcohol is a compulsory Irish pastime.
Two appearances by Nuala on The Late Late Show, the vehicle that brought sex to Ireland, would have afforded her endless hours of rumination, the art form at which she excelled. The most recent was when she was promoting Are You Somebody?, her memoir that sold 1m copies. Goodness, Nuala, said Gay Byrne in his opening remark, but weren’t you awfully promiscuous altogether? In the camera close-up, you can see her flinching.
An earlier clip shows her prettily young in the Late Late audience, fluent and brave, promising to show the bishops some respect once they unhanded her ovaries, or more eloquent words to that effect.
Nuala, the movie, is as enriching as Nuala, the writer. It leaves you thinking, and the lingering thought it left me with was that a good friend is a gift that outlives life itself.
Outwardly, Marian Finucane and Nuala O’Faolain were quite different women. One was a wife, a mother and a publicly capable professional. The other was childless, often floundering in the romantic-love stakes, and professionally fragile. (Nuala never again spoke to an editor who advised her more work was needed on a manuscript.) Their comradeship evokes a vignette in Nuala’s book, Chicago May, about a Longford-born confidence trickster and prostitute. Before escaping to America, May and a fellow prisoner in an English jail refused to pray for British victory in the first world war, and were put to distributing rations among the other inmates. As she lugged vats of gruel, May realised her co-conspirator was reciting Dante’s Inferno. The woman was Constance Markievicz.
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To make this film, Finucane had to be as brutally honest as her departed friend. Was it Oscar Wilde who said true friends stab you in the front? Finucane tells the unlovely truths about Nuala’s treatment of McCafferty, whom the presenter counted as a friend before she ever befriended Nuala. She unclips the veil of privacy she has maintained about her daughter’s death, and has allowed herself to be filmed weeping and grieving.
The last person Nuala spoke to was Finucane, on the phone. By the time she reached her bedside, Nuala was gone. There are shots of Finucane back in Nuala’s Co Clare cottage, its bookshelves voluptuous with crinkled Proust spines. She journeys into her friend’s soul to bear witness to her life.
In a shop recently, I considered buying as a gift for a friend a sign emblazoned “You’ll always be my best friend ... You know too much”. I put it back. The humour did not redeem the triteness.
If Nuala, the woman, was a metaphor for Ireland, Nuala the film is a metaphor for friendship. Don’t miss it.