Black Lake (10 page)

My father, Philip the Second, was born in 1933 and was to be their only child. He married my mother, Katherine, in 1956, and my brother, the third Philip, was born in June of 1958. I came along two years later. I have happy memories of my childhood. Until we went to boarding school, we had lessons in the mornings, taught by both my father and my mother in the upstairs drawing room. When we had finished our school-work, we had a lot to occupy us; I remember building a tree house in one of the oaks by the avenue, the remains of which are still visible today.

My brother went to Trinity to study law when I was fifteen, making it clear that I would have the responsibility of taking over Dulough when the time came.

Surely that was enough. He massaged the web of skin between his right thumb and forefinger. There they were, fiction and truth, so tightly bound that minutes after writing them, he could almost forget which was which. It had come more easily than he had expected. Turning to the first page, he wrote
Dulough: The History of a House in Donegal.
He scratched it out:
Dulough: The History of a Donegal House.
No.
Dulough: A History.
He knew now that the house would never be lived in again, that he’d put something in motion that couldn’t be reversed. Perhaps they all thought it was a good thing—the Campbells were blow-ins who’d turfed five families out of their homes; it was only right that locals should be able to lounge around his house now, having tea and scones on the patio.

He thought about Kate and Philip, how his son had to carry on that name, a word whose short “L” suggested him perfectly, a little slip of a thing, but also that first Philip and his cruelty. What sort of future had he made for them; what damage had he done them? And his wife. Having watched her crying up there in her garden when she thought no one was looking, he knew she wasn’t happy. The exhilaration he’d been getting from writing about the estate vanished. He wanted to have it finished now.

I followed my brother to Dublin three years later, but geography was my subject. I met my wife, Marianne, there. Upon graduating, we married in the chapel on the island. We have two children, Katherine and Philip.

We very much hope that you enjoy your visit and that you will return.

As he was contemplating whether he should sign his name at the end, Marianne appeared at the door. He wondered how long she’d been there, with that disapproving look on her face, watching him labor over the house’s history. He knew she found it unfair that he got to keep his study when Philip was so upset at having lost his room. “Can’t talk now,” he said, fixing his gaze firmly back on his work, determined not to look up again until she was gone. He sensed her weight shift and her body turning away. Why couldn’t she understand that he needed to keep his study—and that Philip had a perfectly good bedroom in the cottage?

When he was quite sure she was gone, that she was too far away to hear anything, he went over to the fireplace and picked up a vase with an elaborate pattern on it. He knew it was valuable. Lifting it over the hearth, as high as his chest, he let it go. It crashed onto the tiles, cracking one neatly down the middle, and broke into smithereens. It was so quiet in the house that the breaking sound hung in the air. He stayed still until it stopped.

But he found, as he lay in bed that night, that he didn’t have it in him to cope with a battle on two fronts. The following morning, in the moments after they woke, when he hoped her guard was down, he said, “Let’s go to Dublin for the weekend. Mrs. Connolly can look after the children.”

She surprised him. “Yes,” she said simply, as she pulled on her dressing gown. She must have thought that they needed it very badly if she was agreeing to leave Kate and Philip behind, so he suggested that they didn’t stay with her parents, that they stay in a proper hotel, in town, and go for nice meals. He would phone the Shelbourne.

They stopped in Enniskillen for a pub lunch of toasted sandwiches and half-pints of lager. As they passed through the border, they talked of an event that had now long passed into family lore, the time that John’s father had driven through a checkpoint within an hour of a bomb, how he’d been watching the news that night and there it was, the tower blown sky-high, the pieces strewn about the field, amongst the cows. The soldiers he’d offered sweets to probably dead. Or maybe not. He’d chosen to believe that the one he’d chatted with as they’d checked over his car, as they’d opened the boot and rifled through its contents, who, by the sound of him, was from Cornwall, or Devon or one of those lovely southern English counties, hadn’t been killed.

John calculated how much their lunch would cost with the exchange rate, the Irish pound weak against the British. But perhaps this would help them when they opened the gates to the visitors, perhaps it would bring the Northerners to Donegal. He was counting on the Americans, though. They were more susceptible to the myth.

The way into Dublin looked quite different, with its vast new spiderweb of roads.

“Do you think that you could have a look at the map, perhaps? Find out where we went wrong?” John asked Marianne.

“Oh yes, sorry—course.” She unclicked her seat belt and climbed into the backseat to rummage about. Most people her age would have twisted around, felt for the map with one hand, but Marianne threw herself into things—scrambled up mountains, ran down to the sea. It was one of her most endearing qualities, John thought, and it was one of the many that made her a much better parent than he was.

When they arrived at the hotel, Marianne’s excitement at the journey had abated and she seemed angry again. Dropping their bags, he looked out the window. “We have a wonderful view of the green.”

She disappeared into the bathroom; he heard the water running. Closing their bedroom door as quietly as he could, he went down to the lobby to phone Mrs. Connolly. She sounded harried. He knew that she felt that they’d asked too much of her, that she had enough to do in the run-up to the opening. But the children would be no bother at all.

In the hotel bar, he ordered a drink. It was best to leave Marianne to her own devices; she would come to find him when she was ready. He looked out the window. The people were rich, there was no other word for it, with their expensive clothes and hands full of shopping. He saw Brown Thomas bags often. Even the bags themselves looked as if they’d cost a fortune to produce. They might assume that he was rich, too, sitting there in the bar of the Shelbourne, but the price of the hotel was out of their league. He’d have to put the bill on his credit card, reasoning with himself that he’d be getting a proper salary soon; he would pay it off.

Marianne came in wearing a long velvet skirt and a cardigan with Christmassy baubles hanging from it. John had never really enjoyed Marianne’s dress sense, and yet the individuality of it was one of the things that had drawn him to her at college. Her hair was newly washed and she wore makeup; there was a sheen to her lips. She looked fresh, as if she had scrubbed off Donegal in the bath and was ready to become part of the city again.

“So, shall we go?” She landed, smiling, in the chair opposite. “Two drinks in one day, not like you.” She took a sip of his Scotch. “Horrible stuff.”

She was not usually this way. He found her shifting moods disconcerting. It was a symptom of the move, of upheaval, of the fact that he’d let her down. He should take advantage of her good humor now. Standing up, he offered her his arm.

They crossed the road so that they could walk along by Stephen’s Green. Marianne reached up and touched various leaves, holding them between her fingers contemplatively and then letting them go so that they snapped back into place. She didn’t say whether she approved of the gardeners’ work or not.

John wanted to walk straight down Dawson Street to Trinity. He was not necessarily sentimental about his college days, but he always liked to visit when he was in town. Marianne never seemed interested in going back, though; she couldn’t have been more eager to graduate, to move on to the next act of her life. She enjoyed being a mother much more than she’d ever liked being a student.

It was a busy Saturday and most people, with the exception of the groups of teenagers hanging limply around street corners, seemed to be in a great hurry. Some of them bumped into John without noticing; they would have apologized ten, or even five, years ago. It was all this new money, he thought—we’re a different country now. But he knew that he was in no position to moralize; he had handed Dulough over to the government in order to make money.

That night, they took the bus to her parents’ house in Rathmines. John wanted to drive, but Marianne said she missed public transport. Her father collected them from the bus stop and drove them the short distance home. The car was needlessly messy. John had to move a pile of books to get into the front seat and the floor was littered with newspapers and shopping bags.

“So you’re finally getting rid of the place, then?” Patrick said as he put the car into gear.

“Well,” John said, “I wouldn’t…”

Marianne saved him. “No, Dad, the government’s going to run the estate. We still own it.”

Her father concentrated on the road. He chuckled. “Good to hear my grandchildren won’t be homeless, then.”

“No, they certainly won’t be homeless.” Annoyed, John added, “Anyway, the cottage is much more practical…”

Marianne reached over and patted his shoulder. He wasn’t sure if that meant “It’s all right” or perhaps “Calm down.” But it was the first time she’d touched him since they’d arrived, and he was grateful for it.

Marianne had grown up in one of those red-brick terraced houses with large, uneven rooms and a gloomy kitchen on the bottom floor. Like their car, Patrick and Anna White’s house was a mess. Every corner was filled: books, piles of sheet music, walking boots caked in mud, the dog’s toys…It made John feel claustrophobic. He liked his parents-in-law on the whole, though. Patrick was a music teacher in a local secondary school and Anna always had a new project; she had just finished a bachelor’s in modern Irish history. John saw textbooks on the floor by the back door.

His mother-in-law had Marianne’s hair and, for that matter, Kate’s, the little curly wisps around their faces. But Anna was thinner than Marianne, so thin that her wrists didn’t look strong enough to hold the big dish she was lifting off the countertop. John took it out of her hands and laid it on the table.

“I’m afraid it’s just pasta.” She paused. “I would have cooked you something special if I’d known you were coming.”

It wasn’t a rebuke. One of the great blessings of John’s marriage was that Patrick and Anna expected nothing of them. They weren’t even offended when Marianne had told them they wouldn’t be staying. In gratitude, John grasped Anna by the shoulders. He said teasingly, “How’s the scholar of the family?”

“I graduated, wore the cap and gown and everything.” She pointed to a photo on the fridge. He studied it. She was throwing her mortarboard in the air like a young woman.

“How are things up there?” She poured vinaigrette on the salad.

Both she and Patrick always referred to Donegal as if it were the North Pole. John was suddenly aware that Marianne and his father-in-law had deserted them and that they were alone in the kitchen. “Oh, you know.” He wondered whether it would be enough to stave off Anna’s enquiries.

“It can’t be easy,” she said.

Anna was one of those people who liked to talk about things. He was glad his own mother hadn’t known her; they wouldn’t have got on with each other at all.

“It must be hard on you, but it seems a very sensible decision to me. You’ll have the best of both worlds, am I right? You won’t have the worry of the maintenance.”

He nodded glumly. “Shall I retrieve the others?” He told himself that she couldn’t be expected to understand—that she’d never lived in a place like Dulough.

They took one of the last buses back into town. The daytime shoppers had become nighttime revelers. John and Marianne watched a young man lean a hand against a shop window and vomit onto the pavement. When he finished, he wiped his mouth and wandered back into a pub.

In their room, Marianne took her second bath of the day, more, she explained, because of the abundance of hot water than anything else. This time she left the bathroom door open. For a good ten minutes, John wondered whether he should go in or not. At last, he shoved his shoes under the bed and took the chance.

There was a towel rolled up under her head. The bubbles had all but melted and he could see the outline of her body under the water, her breasts and knees breaking the surface. He thought of that exhibition in London, of all those women, all those baths. She opened her eyes and smiled tiredly as he sat down on the loo seat. “Could you shut the door? It’s a little chilly.”

He got up silently, obligingly. She closed her eyes again. He wasn’t sure when the balance of power had shifted. Was it when she’d had Kate? Was it when he’d signed the contract with the government? He hadn’t been watching for it because he hadn’t expected it. He tried to focus, to separate the years of their marriage, but he couldn’t. It was one long, looping roll of film, the same images repeated again and again: house, garden, sea, children.

As he lifted his arm to reach down into the warm water, she got up suddenly and groped for a towel. Her eyes had been closed. She couldn’t have seen his hand rising to touch her, but he wondered whether she had somehow sensed it, whether it was an indication for him to back away. He went into the bedroom and picked up the paper.