Black Lake (13 page)

“Well, no, but…”

“The girls”—she nodded her head in the vague direction of the cucumber sandwich assembly line—“had a fry-up this morning. There’s some bacon left over. It’s on a plate in the oven and I’ll do you an egg.”

John had come to realize years ago that, to Mrs. Connolly, a good meal cured most ills. Even now he remembered the spread she’d put out after his mother’s funeral—and probably his father’s—although he couldn’t quite remember that far back. “You have your hands full. I think I can manage to fry myself an egg.”

He saw her consider this for a moment. Usually, she wouldn’t even let him pour his own tea. She went over to the range and lifted down a small frying pan. Turning to one of the girls nearest to her, she said, “Put a slab of butter in there, would you, Clare? And give the gentleman help if he needs it.”

Clare turned to look at John; she was a lovely girl with fine, honey-colored hair. Her defining feature was a large mole on her left cheek, which was really quite beautiful, he thought. She couldn’t have been more than seventeen. John smiled as he walked towards the range. “Thank you, Clare.” She cracked the egg into the frying pan. “I don’t want to interrupt you, I’ll be quite all right.”

Once Mrs. Connolly and Clare had gone back to their tasks, John became excruciatingly aware of his body and the space it took up in that kitchen full of young women. As he pushed at the corners of the fried egg with a spatula, he realized that he was going to have to eat in here, that there was nowhere else for him to go. When the egg was done, he slid it onto a paper plate and turned around. Every surface was covered—in scones, butter, jam, teacups, milk jugs, sandwiches, dirty plates and bowls, heaps of tea towels and forks; there was nothing to do but eat standing by the range. He slid a fork out from one of the piles and took a bite. Girls turned around from time to time to get a look at him. When he had finished, he thanked Clare, who was given no time to answer, and was out the door.

Philip

The
night before the opening, Philip dreamt, as he had the morning of the move, of Dulough during the ice age, of the valley swathed in snow, of the ice pushing down and gouging out the earth, pulling it towards the sea. There were things stuck in the glacier: boulders, their car, the big house itself. When he looked in the windows, he could see that there were people inside, gazing out at the frozen world.

When he finally woke, the memory of his dream was so real that he felt heavy, as if his limbs, too, were encased in ice. He fought to remember where he was. Opening his eyes, he could see that his mother had left out his good clothes on the chair by the door. She had been in his room while he slept; he didn’t like that. He thought of how the men had taken his bed. The visitors were to arrive today, and, though he knew that technically they weren’t allowed in the cottage, he was worried that they might come into his new bedroom anyway. When he got up, the air was damp and cold, as if the mist had invaded the house.

On the avenue, big drops slipped from rhododendron leaves into puddles. Philip saw Francis high up in the valley. He hadn’t said much about opening Dulough to the visitors, and he was the sole adult who wasn’t throwing all his energy into the preparations. His only reaction had been to erect a new deer fence around the house. Philip had seen him talking to the workmen from Dublin one day, showing them how to get a fence post into land that was lined with rock. When Francis turned and walked back off to his shed, one of the men gave him a mock salute. Francis couldn’t have seen it, but Philip noticed that he didn’t have much to do with them after that.

The front door of the big house stood open and a red ribbon hung in the frame. Philip went to the porch and peered inside. Lights on metal stands blazed into the hall. It was an utterly different place; the chessboard tiles on the floor shone, and shadows—of the sideboard, the hat stand, and the telephone table—fell in new ways. Though every corner of the once dark room had been illuminated, the light somehow made it less real, as if they were in a film. Philip had the sensation of knowing the room well and not knowing it at all.

In the drawing room, thick blue ropes hung from brass stands, which stood in a row, like sentries, down the middle of the carpet. Plastic matting covered the floor on the near side of the ropes, and on the far side, a sofa and chairs that Philip didn’t recognize had been arranged into a fireplace scene. A book lay open on a side table. Philip unhooked the ropes and went to get a better look; it was the one with Francis as the fisherman:
The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats
. It was a faded, battered green, with gold lettering. He wished he’d thought to protect it on the day of the move. He scanned the shelves for another that looked like it; the only one he could find was a book about how to identify species of rare trees. Picking up the Yeats and slipping it into his pocket, he put the new one facedown on the table and opened the door as quietly as he could.

He circled up through the house. Every room had a set of blue ropes dividing it in two; he recognized very little of the furniture, which had been arranged to suit a family not his own. To his surprise, his room was the least changed. There was a wardrobe where the wardrobe had been, a bed where the bed had been, even a chair in the corner for an imaginary boy to throw his clothes on before going to sleep. The bed was in significantly better shape than his own; it didn’t sag in the middle. He touched the soft counterpane. It must have been brought up from Dublin. A train set, which had been his father’s and grandfather’s, was set up in one corner of the room. They should have asked him to assemble it; he would have done a much better job.

Without moving the new cushions from the windowsill, he jumped up and looked out over the barn roof. Down below, the hens were clucking in their run like old women. A couple of bikes leant against the hedge, belonging probably to the girls from town, whom he could hear vividly now, below him, in faint murmurs and then loud bursts of laughter. In the distance there was a smattering of snow left on the summit of Mount Errigal, but Muckish and Dooish glowed greenly into the morning.

The white government car drove up to the back of the house and parked on the patch of grass in front of the barn. Mr. Murphy was in the passenger seat. As he opened his door, a second car arrived, sliding into place beside the first. A man Philip recognized from town emerged; it was Frank Foyle, the county councillor. Fat and red-faced, he was always wearing rubber boots with his suit. He went towards Mr. Murphy with his arm outstretched. As they shook hands, the men looked up at the house. Philip stood back quickly and jumped off the sill, leaving the muddy shapes of his feet on the new cushions. He turned them over quickly before running down the back stairs.

In the garden, a marquee was being hoisted into place on the lawn. Men carrying folding chairs and tables flitted in and out of it. None of them seemed interested in Philip, so he walked around, inspecting the preparations. The marquee was really quite big; he wondered how many people it would fit—a couple of hundred, at least? He hadn’t thought before about how many would actually come today, but more than a hundred seemed a lot.

He walked around the periphery of the tent, watching how the men battened it down with wooden stakes. It had windows too, of clear plastic, with mock panes. Inside, he could see people setting up. The girls were coming out of the house now, carrying white cloths that they ballooned over the tables. Still more girls came with vases of flowers. They wore what looked like nurses’ uniforms—white, with a collar and lots of pockets—but they had tied little black aprons around their waists too. It reminded Philip of the time they’d gone to his uncle’s wedding in Dublin; the waitresses serving dinner in the hotel had looked just like that. He wondered if they would be here every day or if this was just for the opening. One of them, a girl with black hair pulled into a neat bun, stopped when she saw him looking in the window. She nudged the one next to her and whispered something in her ear.

By the time the main gates were thrown open to the visitors, Philip was safely back in the cottage. He found Kate in her room. She was sitting on the floor, surrounded by piles of clothes. When he opened the door, she looked up at him despairingly. “I’m supposed to be wearing the dress they got me in Dublin.”

“Look at this.” He beckoned her out the door, towards their parents’ room. The bed was neatly made and the stack of magazines, which had swayed so precariously in the corner since the move, had disappeared, as had the accordion file. He led Kate over to the window. Though it was now late morning, the curtains were still tightly drawn. Where window met wall, he parted the fabric. They peered out.

There were people on the avenue. Having parked their cars down by the gate, they were making their way up to the big house. They were conspicuously tourists, with their brightly colored windbreakers and hiking boots. They took in the steep hills and the dark lake. When they reached the cottages, their eyes traveled first over Francis and Mrs. Connolly’s, with its whitewashed walls and red door. Philip and Kate’s was another story—the garden remained a sea of mud and the house had yet to be painted out of its gray concrete state. The visitors seemed particularly interested in the new cottage and one couple even stopped at the gate to get a better look.

Philip said, “Do you think they want to come in?”

Kate pulled him away from the window.

Philip wasn’t sure what time the opening was to begin, but he knew that they were to wait in the cottage until their father came to bring them up to the big house. It was boring to hang around, and, after he’d had a late bowl of cereal, he fell asleep on top of his duvet. His mother woke him with a warm facecloth. His father and Kate were standing at his bedroom door, watching.

“It’s time we went up, darling.” With her hand on the small of his back, she passed the cloth over his face.

As they walked across the gravel towards the marquee, the girls were ferrying plates of sandwiches between the house and the tent. They were tiny finger sandwiches, made of fluffy white bread with the crusts cut off. Philip thought he saw cucumber poking out the side. He wanted one of those.

It was evening inside the marquee; the plastic windows didn’t let in much light, which made the visitors’ faces look greenish. There must have been at least a hundred people, but Philip knew that he wasn’t very good at maths, so it was hard to tell. The tables had plenty of sandwiches and scones, and the girls wove amongst them, filling up tea and coffee cups. Local voices were all but lost amongst French, American, and German, but the visitors’ voices perceptibly died away when they recognized that the family had arrived.

The tent was much bigger from the outside; when they went in, the family had to squeeze themselves between the visitors to get to the makeshift stage at the far end. His father seemed to know lots of people; he said hello to someone at almost every table they passed. Philip held on tightly to his hand, but his mother and Kate lagged behind, standing over by the door. They had to go back and fetch them, which Philip could tell annoyed his father.

When they reached the stage, Frank Foyle met them, hand outstretched, just as he’d done earlier that morning with Mr. Murphy by the barn. When the farmer-politician reached down to pat Philip on the head, he got a good look at his red nose, the broken veins crisscrossing it like forked lightning. Mr. Foyle put his hand on Kate’s head, too. Philip grinned at her, but she was too disgusted to smile back.

Mr. Murphy slowly came forwards from the back of the stage. He was very tall, much taller than Mr. Foyle, and a lick of his hair stood straight up at the front. When he shook hands with Philip’s father, Philip saw that they knew each other quite well; his father called him “Michael” and uncharacteristically clapped him on the shoulder. Philip and Kate were to sit between their parents on a row of chairs lined up at the back of the stage, with Mr. Murphy and Frank Foyle at each end. Philip turned to his mother; she was looking straight ahead. It was impossible for him to tell what she thought of all this, but he wished that she would turn to him, even for a second.

The audience watched the stage expectantly, ready for a little entertainment. Frank Foyle blew into the microphone. “Thank you for coming. We’d like to extend a warm welcome to you all, whether you’re from across the water or just down the road.”

He paused and turned around.

Philip’s father put his hand down and gently silenced Philip’s feet, which had been thudding against the legs of the chair.

Frank Foyle smiled indulgently and went back to his speech. “Today’s a great day, a great day indeed…”

Philip sat directly opposite one of the plastic windows that looked out over the forest. He could see the trunks, dark and wet, and the giant ferns with leaves that cupped water for days after rainfall like they’d had last night. The path up there would be very muddy today, he thought, as Francis stepped out from behind a tree and peered in at him over the heads of the audience. Philip lifted his hand to wave, but the old man turned away and was engulfed by the forest again. Had Francis seen him? He wasn’t sure. But there he was again, closer now, not ten feet from the edge of the tent, looking in through the distorted panes. Philip waved and the audience turned to look behind them. Frank Foyle faltered for a moment but kept going, glancing up from time to time to see if they’d come back to him.

“Now, if you’ll permit me. I’ll let you in on our plans for this grand old place. We have been awarded a very generous grant from the Office of Public Works.” He turned and nodded at Mr. Murphy. “And we have ambitious plans, ambitious plans. In addition to opening the house for guided tours, which you’ll be able to partake in the enjoyment of today, we’ll be building a Visitors’ Center down by the front gates, in the field where yous all parked your cars this morning. It will be a state-of-the-art, eco-friendly edifice, built right into the side of the hill so as not to disturb the natural habitat. There’ll be a restaurant serving full lunches, museum-type exhibits about the flora and fauna of the area, and”—he paused for effect—“a state-of-the-art cinema, which will show a film about Dulough. In the evenings there will be provision to use the space for visiting musicians and performances.”