Black Lake (4 page)

Outside, there was still no movement from the men in the white van. They were sleeping off their lunch. On the gravel, the wind blew up the corners of the plastic city and allowed the rain to soak Philip’s bed, so that he wouldn’t be able to sleep on it. He would be with Kate in her new room and they would fight over the covers.

That night, for the first time in its life, the big house was empty. The wind still flew down the valley and rattled Philip’s windows, but their owner was not there to imagine them blowing in. The deer herd came down as close as they dared to the house and sheltered amongst the Scots pines. Below them, at the end of the garden, where cliffs gave way to the Atlantic, it was sea, sea, all the way to America.

John

If
he is going to leave, he needs to leave now, before the men come, before dawn. He rises in the half-light, his trousers on the chair where he left them. No clean shirt; that would mean opening the wardrobe and waking Marianne. His wife is still asleep, head sunk deeply into the pillow. She wears a nightgown that she made herself, lace up to the neck and buttons down the front; it reaches all the way to her toes and is warmer, she tells him, than any of the ones they make nowadays, the ones you’d get from Dunnes or Penneys. As he laces his shoes, without socks, because they, too, are in the wardrobe, he watches his sleeping wife.

Outside, he walks away from the house. The dawn comes up over the lake, sliding down the hills and across the water. He is tired and, for the lack of a shirt, already cold, his woolen jumper itching his bare skin. Save for when he was at school and college, he has never lived anywhere but here. His parents sent him away at seven. It was what their sort of people did then, but he resolved in those first weeks, his classmates sleeping around him, that once he was old enough, he would return to Dulough for good.

It hadn’t surprised him that Marianne was happy to leave the place where she’d grown up; though he’d got used to Dublin when he was in college, he knew that it was impossible to be as attached to the city as to the country. She took to Dulough easily, running the gardens, designing a new one where there was a natural rise and plateau behind the house, before the hills proper. It is an Oriental garden, perfectly square, with four small temples on long columns at each corner, and flowers that grow so symmetrically they seem unreal. A statue of the Buddha sits in the middle, smiling benignly at the horizon. None of his own family would have thought of that. The statue was ordered from India, from a village called Bodh Gaya, where they say the Buddha found enlightenment. It arrived unbroken, but now the daily rain weathers it at a ferocious pace.

Marianne spends afternoons on the grounds, usually alone, but sometimes with Francis or the children. John is much more nervous about her reaction to strangers roaming there than the house. The government has given her a field of rocky soil on the headland, and she has taken cuttings from her favorite plants, moving them up, out of the way of the tourists. She has planted a barrier of rhododendrons, which he knows she is counting on to knit together and shield her garden from the world.

John has been so immersed in arrangements for the move, in meetings with the government men, with Frank Foyle, with Mr. Murphy, that he had not considered the possibility that he would wake up this morning and go—that he would not be in the thick of it all. He hasn’t had time to imagine what the house might look like emptied of all its contents, as blank spaces and marked walls. And because he can imagine it now, he leaves. The house’s insides haven’t changed from the day the walls were originally papered, the furniture positioned in configurations conceived of by the first Philip, who had come to Ireland from Scotland in the years after the Famine. If anything would disturb his ancestor’s ghost, allowing strangers to walk the house would surely be it. What John has more difficulty with is what his parents and grandparents would think; they managed to keep the estate going through the various wars. They survived, a world unto themselves. His mother told him that as a child, it had been her job to cut up old newspapers and stack them neatly next to the loo. Marianne wouldn’t think much of that. In college, it irked him when she had chosen expensive places to eat—restaurants that cost half the price would have done just as well. But he soon understood that she liked a sense of occasion.

He often wondered whether she felt that she had been lured to Dulough under false pretenses. Though he hadn’t deliberately lied about his finances, he hadn’t been forthcoming when he asked her to marry him. He would not admit it to Marianne, but he is, in many ways, relieved by the deal. The estate is an expensive place to run. His mother, in a fit of benevolent stupidity, willed him the house and his brother most of the money that was left to run it. John thought that he and Marianne would be able to live on the few investments he did have, and from renting out the fields. But he had calculated badly; it hadn’t been enough for a long time now.

Marianne would have been forgiven for thinking that she would have stability and peace. This had certainly been true for her in the first ten years of their life together. John was quite proud that he had managed to hide the fact that they were running out of money fast. Mrs. Connolly knew, though; she took in the post in the mornings and deduced that the “Final Reminder” stamped across the tops of bills was not simply John’s absentmindedness. She encouraged him to confide in Marianne. There shouldn’t be secrets between husbands and wives, she said. Mrs. Connolly hadn’t asked then about her own future at Dulough, or Francis’s—whether she could not conceive that they would ever do without her, or from a desire not to add to John’s worries, he couldn’t tell. He had been remiss not to reassure her then, he thinks.

It took him the best part of a year to tell Marianne. It was two summers ago now. They had all spent the day on the beach, the children running up and down from the water to where an orange three-man tent had been pitched beyond the tide line, to shield them from the wind and the sudden rain showers. They picnicked in there at lunchtime, Kate and Philip wrapped in towels, their hair slicked back against their smooth skulls, their legs, plastered in sand, tucked underneath them. Philip brought a crab into the tent and it scuttled about the sides, desperately looking for a way to get out. John picked it up by its shell and took Philip down to the water so that they could watch it return to the sea. “He’ll like it better there, don’t you think?” But he could see that Philip wasn’t so sure. He watched as his son wrestled with whether to cry. From Marianne, he had learnt to turn away from the children at moments like this. To them, it was only worth crying when they had an audience. He walked back up the beach to where she was cleaning up the picnic.

As John had watched her buttering bread for the children, so fully ensconced in Dulough, so much a part of the place, he realized that he would be able to tell her then without any possibility of her reneging on their agreement—which was their marriage—and returning to the city. Before the children, he’d wondered if she might have left if things hadn’t gone smoothly; he had worried that he wasn’t enough of an anchor for her. The worry persisted, even now, perhaps more than ever now, as they left the big house for the cottage. But he might have been selling her short to have believed she could go.

That night, after they’d come up from the beach and bathed the children, fed them supper and put them to bed, their noses red from an unusual amount of sun, he told her. She had been stoical, more concerned with his feelings than her own, determined to look on the bright side. After all, the tourists would only be there for half the year; the rest of the time they would continue in glorious isolation. The last bit she said with a wry smile, which he hadn’t been quite sure how to interpret.

But John had tried to make money, hadn’t he? The trouble was that Donegal was not an easy place to find a job. He supposed that he could have taken a flat in Dublin during the week and come up and down at the weekend. But who would have schooled the children? Marianne couldn’t have done it on her own. And she wouldn’t have liked being the only one in the house at night, Kate and Philip waking in the small hours, hungry or thirsty, or in need of a cuddle after a bad dream. She was childlike herself sometimes.

There had been the various schemes to try to make the estate pay for itself. But, over the years, he had been forced to sell off one piece of property and then another, remnants of his family’s holdings, in Scotland and abroad, in Africa, and in countries he barely recognized the names of. These investments amazed him—that a firm somewhere in London had been buying and selling on their behalf for the best part of a hundred and fifty years. Of course, he’d had to have Phil’s signature for these sales too. His brother had been surprisingly willing to sell the last of the family’s investments, out of guilt, John supposed, that he had nothing to do with the estate anymore. Phil phoned him when they sold the last investment. They talked then about what should be done, and it was Phil who’d come up with the idea that Dulough might be a tourist attraction. People visited stately homes all the time, and if Dulough wasn’t quite stately, Phil was certain that could be made up for by its eccentric design, by the unusual gardens and beautiful scenery. John was surprised at Phil’s description; he had never heard his brother talk about the estate in such positive terms.

He needs to stop lingering in the garden; he wants to get away from the house before he is seen out a window and called back to what really is his duty. He knows that he is not doing the honorable thing by disappearing on this day of all days. Moving through the kitchen garden, following a path overgrown with purple foxgloves and rhododendrons, he is in the foothills of the valley. The grass is wet and knee-high; the water soaks through his trousers. The valley is so steep that he cannot climb straight up. He zigzags in wide arcs to reach the top. Thin ribbons of pathways, worn by the deer, mark the way. Their tracks are beginning to grow over and there is no dung; they haven’t been by in a while. He doesn’t much like the deer; they are impressive from far away, especially the males, with their huge antlers, but up close they are like any large animal, unclean and unpredictable. They are one of the last herds of red deer in Ireland, and even if the tourists aren’t likely to ever see them, it gives Dulough the air of a wildlife preserve, which he hopes will be another attraction when the gates open.

Turning to see how high he has climbed, he looks down. The roof is a dark, uneven shape below him, with turrets and crenulated walls sprouting off in all directions, the gardens a patchwork quilt of greens. But it is not the gardens he loves. The mountains are covered in rock—scree, boulders. Near the ridge, the grass has been shorn away by the wind to reveal patches of granite underneath, like raw flesh under skin. The water that fills the bottom of the valley is colder than the sea. When the children were small, he and Marianne would row them from the moorings behind the house to the other side of the lake for picnics. Philip took a liking to the little boat, and sometimes they rowed about the lake, just the two of them. When he hadn’t the time, Francis was kind about doing it. Kate was Francis’s favorite, though. When she was little, she followed him around the gardens as he worked, and when she wanted to follow him into the hills, he made an Eskimo-style sling so that he could carry her on his back, her little legs dangling above his own. When John didn’t approve, Marianne asked him if he thought it was dangerous, but wasn’t no one safer up there than Francis?

As he’d explained to Francis that the estate was to be opened to the public, the old man showed no concern, as John had expected, for the house or for the gardens, only for Kate and Philip. But Francis wasn’t the one who watched the bank accounts, and Francis wasn’t responsible for the bills—any of them—not even the electricity in his and his wife’s cottage. John took care of that, too.

When Marianne was pregnant with Kate, John had resolved that their children would stay with them in Donegal—that they would be schooled at home until they went to the local secondary school. But it might not be a bad idea for the children to go away after all, to shield them from all this upheaval. Each time he considered Francis’s reaction to the news, he got more worried about the effect the move was having on Kate and Philip. How would they react to the loss of their home, to the sudden presence of strangers?

His eyes follow the contours of the hills, up to Errigal and down again to Dooish. The landscape is so familiar that he knows it better than his own body, better than his children’s bodies.

Philip is very thin and very white; the doctor told them to make sure he had a decent glass of milk every day so as to fatten him up. Years of decent glasses of milk have not fattened Philip up, but it doesn’t seem to have done him any harm; he is perfectly capable of fending for himself, more so than his sister, who looks much healthier. Kate and Philip are infinitely better nourished than John was as a child; his memories are full of white bread and cakes and orange squash, whereas Marianne won’t let Mrs. Connolly feed the children anything but vegetables and organic meat.

A man is walking towards John across the top of the ridge. He wears a ragged shirt and tie under an old tweed jacket, as if he left the house in his Sunday best and dragged himself through a thicket. It is Owen Mór, who owns the land adjacent to Dulough.

The old farmer is trespassing, and John wonders how often he passes from his own land onto theirs. He is watching the bottom of the valley. When John looks in the same direction, he sees the moving lorry winding its way up the avenue towards the house. It’s followed by a small white van. He glances at his watch; they’re late. Still, it has given him time to get well out of the way. When he looks up again, Owen Mór is staring directly at him. His face hasn’t changed from when he thought he was alone; his mouth is a thin, lipless line almost hidden by a white half-grown beard. Some sort of sheepdog-collie mix limps up behind him, as expressionless as his owner.