Black Lake (21 page)

I took a writing desk and its little chair from a bedroom that hadn’t been used since we had all our friends to stay, a back bedroom with nothing to distinguish it except that it was Philip’s favorite hiding place. He fitted inside the corner of the wardrobe completely, so that even when we opened the door, he could squash himself into one end without being seen. The first time he did it, we looked for him for fifteen or twenty minutes. It seemed a very long time and I tried to hide my panic. After he died, a part of me believed Philip was hiding in that wardrobe. I still can’t shake the notion that he’s playing a long game of hide-and-seek, that he’s hiding somewhere new, and all we have to do is find him.

I hadn’t much trouble with the desk; it was small, a Victorian lady’s travel desk with folding legs. I carried it under one arm up the stairs, and then I went back for the chair.

When I got to the top I put them down next to the big windows and began a letter to him, my husband, who has never understood anything.

I leave the following Monday morning. Kate has only been at school a week. John has only been home a few days, his efforts to avoid me almost comical. I get into the car before six o’clock in the morning, in the knickers I’ve slept in, my teeth unbrushed, my hair wanting a comb. I roar down the avenue, knowing that the minibuses won’t be there for hours. There’s a tractor out on the main road. I could kill him he’s going so slowly. When he turns into a field, I put my foot down for the Donegal bypass and the road to Dublin.

As I drive, the last scene I read in Olivia’s diary plays in my mind: She’s in the bath, wondering still whether Geoffrey’s going to leave, whether she should ask him outright. There’s a knock at the door, Áine with more water. But it’s him. He doesn’t ask if he can come in and he doesn’t look at her until he’s sitting on the three-legged stool near the taps, the one we still have in there now. He takes out his sketch pad and rests it on his crossed knees. He has a white tin cup with him and she realizes with relief that it is not a drink; it’s full of charcoal. His fingers are stained, he has been drawing elsewhere in the house. Olivia wonders what made him stop and come to find her, how he knew she was here. She is aware of her breasts breaking the surface of the water and she wonders whether her hair, gray now and slick against her head, is unattractive to him. She lifts a hand to fix it.
Don’t move,
he says quietly. So she closes her eyes and keeps her body still, listening to the scratch of charcoal on paper.

I stop in Enniskillen, at the playground that is the almost precise midpoint in the journey between our part of Donegal and Dublin. Last summer, Philip left his shoes behind in the car park. He took them off before settling in for the rest of the drive home and forgot to pull them back inside. I blamed Kate for distracting him, but it was my fault for not checking.

The school is more cheerful than I remember; there are lots of students around now, huddled in groups, moving between buildings, running up the path that leads to the sports fields. I have Kate’s timetable in the glove compartment. Elevenish on a Monday, the beginning of her history lesson. It’s easy to find the classroom. There are only three buildings and each is clearly labeled. Putting my hand to my hair, I wish I’d thought to look in the mirror before getting out of the car. I peer through the thick, institutional glass in the door and knock. The teacher turns from the board, surprised.

“I’m Kate’s mum.” I see her sitting in the middle of the room, my daughter, in her uniform, her hair pulled neatly back into a ponytail, and it strikes me how different she is already, after only a week. “Hello, darling.” Her eyes are wide, her mouth parted. She glances down at her desk and goes to close her textbook, then changes her mind and leaves it open, looking to her teacher for direction.

“Katherine, you’d better…”

A girl next to her is packing up Kate’s things, as if she is the only person who understands why I’m here. She hands Kate her bag and tries to catch her eye, but my daughter won’t lift her head. It was unthinking of me to have chosen a classroom; I should have found her at lunch or in her dormitory. But there isn’t anything to be done about that now. I put my arm around her shoulders and take her bag from her as we walk out the door.

She sits quietly on her bed while I put her clothes in the suitcase. The other side of the cubicle is plastered with photos, but Kate has left her own walls bare, confirmation surely that she never really wanted to be here. She doesn’t help me pack until I open the top drawer of her bedside table. “I’ll do that,” she says, as she sweeps the contents quickly into her knapsack, making me wonder what sort of grown-up secrets she has learnt so quickly to harbor.

It is easy to take her. I had expected the young history teacher to alert someone. But no one stops us as we traipse down the stairs of the girls’ dorms with her suitcase and bedcovers. For the first hour of the journey, I find myself looking in the mirror, as if the school might have called the gardaí, but I catch myself and laugh. Why would they do that? Kate is mine.

She sleeps most of the journey, wrapped in her duvet in the backseat. As we pass through the checkpoint in the North, she wakes briefly when the soldiers peer into the car. They grin at her, the pattern from the seats tattooed into her flushed cheeks. When we’re over the border, she rummages around in the plastic bag at her feet and takes out the sandwiches I’ve brought.

“Which one do you want?” she asks.

“You choose.” She feeds me bites, watching the road in front carefully so that she doesn’t distract me at a dangerous moment, but the car bumps over the cat’s-eyes anyway. Pulling the sandwich back, she says, “Be careful, Mum.”

She falls asleep again, waking only with the thundering of the cattle grid as we cross the threshold between world and home.

The cottage is cold and dark. Kate sits on her bed and chatters her teeth dramatically. “Where’s Dad?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did he not know I was coming home?”

When I don’t answer, she says, “It’s freezing in here.”

“Why not put the kettle on, then?”

I go into the bathroom. Cold air leaks in under the door. He must be back. I wash my hands quickly. But it’s Mrs. Connolly. I pause, unseen, at the threshold of the kitchen.

She asks, “Are you sick,
alannah?
”

“No.”

“So what is it that brings you home?”

There is silence and I wonder what sort of messages are passing between them. I wait for Mrs. Connolly to leave before I go in. There is a plate on the table with scones covered in cling film. “Did she bring those?” I ask, as I slide them into the bin. We take our tea into Kate’s bedroom. She has managed to pilfer a scone; she gnaws a butterless, jamless corner.

“May I open it?” I kneel down in front of her suitcase, mindful of her new grown-upness. She puts the scone down and opens it herself. Taking out a pile of jeans and t-shirts, she moves towards her chest of drawers. There is no end to how dutiful this child is today. That place has already made her submissive.

“Not your own clothes. You can leave them in.” I reach inside and pull out her uniform, her school shoes. “Just these.” I hang them up in her wardrobe.

“What are you doing, Mum?”

“You’ll see in a sec. Finish your tea.”

She puts her empty teacup down with a flourish, as if to say,
Okay, I’m ready.

I close her suitcase and turn it onto its wheels. As we leave, I see Francis watching television in the front room of their cottage. Mary will be busy in the kitchen at the back, making dinner. The Connollys don’t eat the leftovers from the restaurant; it’s not their sort of thing.

The big house is quiet. I pull the letter I’ve written to John out of my pocket and leave it on the hall table. It occurs to me for the first time that he might be in his study; I forgot to ask what his plans were for the day. Did he even notice I was gone? On the stairs, I listen for a late tour group. We haven’t far to go, but it wouldn’t do to run into them. I put Kate’s suitcase down and pull my shoes off. I gesture that she should do the same. If she was sorry to have been taken out of school, she hasn’t complained. If she misses her new friends, she hasn’t said a word. And now, as I lead her away again from what she is used to, she follows. At the end of the landing, I pull the key out of my pocket and open the door to the third floor.

When I have safely locked it behind us, Kate says, “I thought we weren’t allowed up here.”

“Philip the First intended this to be the ballroom, you know.”

“I know, Mum.”

“It’s very unusual to have a ballroom at the top of a house.”

Kate considers this. “Why wasn’t it a ballroom in the end?”

“Philip the First thought God wouldn’t approve. He was a Presbyterian. Presbyterians don’t approve of dancing.”

“Why?”

“Because they don’t like to have too much fun.” And then I felt badly for not giving her a proper answer. “To be honest, I’m not sure; it might be because they associate dances with drinking and they don’t drink, or it might be because they think that dancing might lead to sex and they don’t approve of that either. Or it might be a little of both.”

“Oh.”

John would disapprove of me talking to her about sex, but she’s nearly thirteen. It’s about time, and she would have learnt about it in that school sooner rather than later. He probably hadn’t thought of that.

We rest at the top of the stairs. I am proud of the work I’ve done. It will be heaven to wake up here after the darkness of the cottage. I throw open the curtains I’ve made so that the light will stream in tomorrow morning. The movement catches the eye of a groundsman below. He looks up but, thinking he’s mistaken, moves away, grinding a cigarette into the gravel. When I turn, Kate is at the far end of the room, staring at the painting covering the end wall.

“Do you recognize what it is? It’s called a trompe l’oeil.”

She moves a few steps closer. It’s Dulough: lake, forest, hills, hanging valleys, the cirque at the end, even the Connollys’ cottage, small and white, with a plume of smoke curling its way to the heavens. The sky is dark, and clouds roll in from the sea, so real that one can feel the threat of rain. The deer herd is at the edge of the forest and there are wood pigeons in the trees. There is the island and the church, the stained glass window still intact. There is the side avenue and the road to town, and there is the house, dark, overgrown with ivy, its turrets shooting into the wet sky. The whole thing could move at any moment; the deer go into the forest, the rain begins, Mrs. Connolly comes out of her cottage to take in the washing. Kate traces her finger along the edge of the lake; when she takes it away it is stained blue.

“An artist called Geoffrey Roe did this. More than a hundred years ago. Do you like it?”

Kate nods.

I am suddenly happy. I take her hand. “Come on, I’ll teach you how to waltz.”

She reluctantly allows herself to be led in small dancing circles, her feet dragging on the floor, her arms limp.

“Stand up straight.” I hum my own made-up tune. “That’s it, you’re not bad at all.”

We move about the vast room. I hold my one remaining child closer and closer and when I forget to sing, we lose the rhythm of our steps. Soon our dance is only a series of hushed lurches left and right, backwards and forwards, until we stop altogether and stand in the middle of the room, still.

The Spring After

Chapter 2

John
has been monastic this winter, speech kept to a bare minimum, usually with Murphy or Mrs. Connolly, and only about the business of opening the estate again for the upcoming season. Marianne is to come home today. She has been in Dublin all winter, where her parents have been looking after her, careful not to make promises about when she might be ready to return to Donegal. Though John has not admitted it to himself until now, he has worried that she might not come back, that she might choose to stay in the city. He has come out to the island for a last morning of solitude, to ready himself for her return. Sitting on the wreckage of the fallen church, he has a view of Philip’s grave and of the hut his son had just finished building when he died.

Marianne’s parents have discouraged John from speaking to her whilst she’s been away. When they do talk, he is careful about the subjects he chooses: her garden, Kate. His wife seems to have accepted that their daughter will stay at boarding school now, where she is happy. Kate has asked if she might bring a friend home for the Easter holidays, which they have taken as a good sign.

The night Marianne was forced down from the ballroom, after John carried her downstairs into the watery winter light, slipping her into the back of her parents’ car, Kate had slept on the floor of his bedroom. He hadn’t known what to say to her, so he offered to read her stories, as he had when she was little. She fetched a stack of books, and he read for more than two hours, his voice growing hoarse towards the end, willing her to sleep. But he had been prepared to read all night if that’s what was needed.

For the next few days, they had drifted around the cottage. Kate spent most of her time curled up, reading on her bed, not the books she’d asked him to read that first night, but more grown-up books, with the stamp of the boarding school library on them. John hoped she was trying to keep up with her English class. He was afraid to leave her alone in the cottage, but he longed for his study, where he’d be able to think properly.