Authors: Johanna Lane
Black Lake (14 page)
Frank Foyle had turned around now; he was watching Kate’s and Philip’s faces with obvious satisfaction. He made a little clapping motion. Philip understood and, looking out over the audience, began to clap. Frank Foyle smiled down at him. He lifted his hands as if to stop thunderous applause. “May I remind you of all the amenities at your disposal today: Tours of the house will begin in half an hour or so—please assemble outside the front door for that. I’ll be cutting the ribbon before the first tour…enjoy the grounds, this great lady behind me”—Frank Foyle gestured to Philip’s mother—“has written a guide to the gardens; they’re available by the door. The tearooms will be opening on the patio behind the house at about two o’clock, as long as it doesn’t rain, but if so, they’ll be in the conservatory, also at the back of the house. Lastly, ladies and gents, we’d ask that you don’t go down to the beach or attempt to get out to the island. We’re not insured for any of you to be eaten by the sharks.”
He smirked at his own joke, but Philip noticed that it was the same thing the men had said when he’d come up from building his hut. He wondered if they’d told Mr. Foyle that he’d been in trouble for going out to the island. He watched for a look that said he knew what Philip had been up to, but he didn’t even turn around. Instead he added, “And of course, I’d like to introduce you to the owners of the estate, sitting here patiently behind me. They’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have this afternoon. Now, please enjoy yourselves and come back soon; don’t forget that every time you return, there’ll be more amenities to enjoy.”
The audience clapped limply, tired of him now. Frank Foyle turned and shook first Mr. Murphy’s hand, then Philip’s father’s and mother’s. People rose in relief. The brightly colored windbreakers and hiking boots made for the door. Philip turned to his parents, but his father was talking to Mr. Murphy, and his mother was nowhere to be seen, she having turned and slipped away as soon as the county councillor had finished his speech.
John
watched Marianne leave, clutching her guide to the gardens and his history of the house. Murphy had kept his word and printed the whole lot; John was suddenly stricken with panic that Marianne might catch him in the lies he’d written. The IRA had never occupied Dulough. That was a story he’d stolen from his Wicklow cousins. John’s brother was the only other person capable of pointing out the falsehoods, but he was in Dublin, most likely on the golf course today, and anyway Phil would have endorsed this decision. But John knew that Marianne would be of the opinion that appropriating Irish history to suit his own ends was very cheap indeed. Though she’d never said it, he knew that she found Dulough’s past upsetting. The first time she saw the ruins of those cottages, she’d gone quiet and he had wondered whether she was reconsidering her love for him, a man with Philip the First’s blood in his veins.
The rain began to fall softly on the marquee, just as it had during their wedding reception. He remembered that day well, how he’d woken in his bed at dawn, the instant knowledge that there could be no going back now. Not that he’d wanted to go back. He was seized that morning by a need to tell Marianne about Dulough, having, he realized, told her almost nothing. He went to her room and saw the white dress hanging on the cupboard door; her expression told him that he shouldn’t be there, that he shouldn’t see her before the ceremony, that he shouldn’t see the dress—and then he’d watched her reject all that. He sat her down on the bed and in the hour before the hair lady came told her all sorts of things, so many things that he’d been a little sheepish later, when he saw her again, about how much he’d packed into that hour. Unlike in the brochure, he told only truths, the surprisingly small amount of information he had about what had gone on in this place in the hundred and fifty years or so before she arrived. What was he doing? Was he trying to impress her? But she’d already said yes, the evidence hanging there on the cupboard door.
It was she who’d insisted on the chapel, despite the fact that it might fall down around their guests’ ears. They had to perform the ceremony at ten o’clock in the morning so as to accommodate the tides. He remembered their family and friends trouping over the beach in their finery, heels sinking into the sand, Marianne’s veil trailing in the water, so that later it would leave a sticky, salty trail up the aisle.
Francis had worked hard to get the church ready, pulling weeds from between the pews, cleaning the altar of the remnants of birds and small animals. It was a glorious day; but for one quick shower, the sun shone from early in the morning until after eight o’clock that night, when the stragglers came inside to finish the whiskey and the wine. Mostly Trinity people, he remembered. He hadn’t seen that lot in years; the problem with living in such an out-of-the-way place was that no one ever visited. At least there’d be more people around now, he thought.
Mrs. Connolly had done all the food for the wedding herself, with no help, despite the fact that Marianne had circled the kitchen in the days preceding their marriage, offering her services. She had been rebuffed, out of kindness, for hadn’t the bride better things to be doing than chopping and peeling? Marianne told him that she had not dared to say, well, no, actually she hadn’t.
But the day had really come off very well, he thought. The Irish and English guests alike had been charmed by Dulough. In the middle of the afternoon, when the sky suddenly darkened and for half an hour emptied its contents on Donegal, he remembered children running around the house, playing hide-and-seek, and adults milling, glasses in hand, glad to be on a sofa after those wrought-iron chairs. He remembered standing in the bay window with Marianne, watching the men, who seemed to appear from nowhere, in their white jackets, tipping chairs against tables so that they wouldn’t hold the rain. That was the moment he had felt married to her, looking out over their gardens, and past them, to the sea. Someone had taken a photograph, one of their college friends, and John had been surprised, on opening the envelope with the Dublin postmark, not that the photo had been taken without his knowledge, but that he and Marianne were standing inches apart, without touching, which is not how he remembered it.
John had thought, as they drove back from Dublin a few weeks ago, after their weekend in the Shelbourne, that things were looking up, that Marianne had got the anger out of her system. He felt sure they had come to an understanding in that hotel room, a room far grander than his old college digs, but enough of a reminder of their student days to invoke a truce.
He knew better than to follow her as she fled the marquee now. Mrs. Connolly was wrong; there had to be unsaid things between husbands and wives, and he had learnt that, though these were the things that saved you, they separated you too.
A
few hours later, the ribbon cut and the tours begun, Philip was back in the big house. He had come to ask Bríd, the guide, if he could hear one of her talks. He stood in the hall, listening, but there was no sound, not even the girls in the kitchen.
He went upstairs, the new carpet as soft as grass. Still nothing. Instinctively, he turned towards his bedroom; the door was open and there was a smear of mud on the threshold. He skirted the room with the intention of going out the other door and disappearing down the back stairs, but at the foot of the bed there was a little boy playing with the old train set. The boy was holding the pea-green engine and running it roughly backwards and forwards over a lone piece of track. The rest had been pulled apart and lay scattered on the floor. A signalman was wedged underneath the cupboard door, his head cracked and lolling to one side. As Philip stood, wondering what he should do, the boy looked up.
Philip strode over to where he was kneeling and grabbed the engine out of his hands. Mr. Murphy had asked if it could be used as a
prop;
he had not said that it would be
played
with. This was not what he had agreed to. The boy fled underneath the bed. Philip bent down. “This is my bedroom.” The boy looked out at him from behind the folds of the counterpane. “You’ve got to be careful; if you run it hard, you’ll break the wheels, see?” He turned the engine over and held it up to the boy’s nose, so he could see the row of wheels that ran along the bottom. Then, handing the engine back, he pulled the broken signalman from underneath the cupboard door, examined him carefully, and slipped him into his pocket to be glued later.
Sitting cross-legged on the carpet, Philip put a pile of miniature people in the gap between his legs, so that they wouldn’t be stepped on. He began to assemble the track. The boy stayed quiet under the bed. Philip had nearly forgotten about him when, after ten minutes or so, he crawled out and sat opposite. Philip handed him a few pieces of track as a peace offering.
When they had finished, it spiraled around a good portion of the room. They began to assemble a long train of cars.
“You just have to push the button there,” Philip said. “And it’ll go.”
The boy pushed the button and the engine started off.
“I’m Philip.” The train went through a tunnel. The boy didn’t offer his name in return. “Philip,” he said again. “This is my room, we’re just letting people visit.” But the boy was too interested in following the little train’s progress to answer. Philip grabbed it up from the tracks and held it to his chest. The wheels spun furiously. “What…is…your…name?” He sounded out each word in case the boy was a foreigner.
“Jamie.”
“Jamie,” Philip confirmed, handing him back the engine.
They played until they heard the guide’s voice coming along the landing. Philip dived under the bed. The bed was very high, and he was able to lean back against the wall. He tried to breathe as quietly as he could. Luckily, Jamie didn’t follow him; he was too engrossed in trying to help the tiny passengers board the train.
The door opened and ten pairs of feet came into the room, settling on the plastic sheeting just the other side of the blue ropes. A woman said, “Jamie!” as a set of arms swooped down and picked up the little boy. He began to cry. A male voice apologized and bent down to tidy up the train set. He was rougher with it than Philip’s own mother or father would have been. Pressing his back against the wall and pulling his knees up to his chin, Philip hoped that Jamie’s father wouldn’t stoop low enough to see his hiding place.
There was Bríd’s soft voice: “Not to worry, not to worry.” But her tone changed when she began her talk. “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the final part of our tour. This was originally a servants’ room—that door over there leads to the back stairs and down to the kitchen—but was converted into a family bedroom sometime after World War Two…”
Philip could hear the visitors murmuring their interest in his room. He heard a creak as someone opened and closed the cupboard door.
“I’m sorry, sir, but I’m going to have to ask you not to touch the furniture.”
“Which of the ones we saw today slept here?” Philip thought it might have been Jamie’s father. He hoped Jamie stayed quiet.
“That would have been their youngest, Philip,” Bríd answered. “Into everything, so he is, loves getting up to all sorts of mischief.”
Some of the visitors chuckled. Philip had only met Bríd once, so he wondered how she knew this. For the second time that afternoon, he felt that people—his parents, Mr. Foyle, the workmen—had been talking about him when he wasn’t around. He wondered what else they’d said, and whether Bríd would give away this fact each time she brought a group into his room.
She finished her tour by giving some history of the furniture, telling visitors that it hadn’t been moved for more than a hundred years. Philip knew this to be a lie; it had arrived from Dublin over the past few weeks and been made to
look
as if it belonged in the house. He wanted to crawl out from his hiding place to tell them.
“Now, if you’ll just follow me. We’ll go down the back stairs and into the conservatory, where our tour began. You can find your way out to the gardens from there. Thank you for your attention, ladies and gentlemen. You’ve been a great group altogether. Please enjoy the rest of your visit and come back soon.”
Philip made sure to leave a healthy gap between the group’s departure and crawling out from under the bed. After making his way quietly down the back stairs, he slid along the kitchen wall and into the conservatory. There were clusters of white wrought-iron tables and chairs amongst the potted ferns, and a long serving counter against the inner wall. It looked very different to the room that he and Kate used to play in on wet days. He could hear the rain now, dripping onto the glass roof.
He watched the last of Bríd’s tour disappear through the outer door, dodging a stream of water as they went. Inside, seated by the window, was a large woman. She wore a pink tracksuit and her tummy bulged out the bottom of her jumper, falling onto her thighs. She sat with her legs apart, planting her runners squarely on the tiled floor as if she was aware that her great body needed firm support. When she sensed Philip looking at her from behind one of the plants, she turned around to face him. She was holding a scone with strawberry jam and cream halfway to her lips, and there was a smudge of icing sugar on her cheek. She smiled at Philip. “You’re one of the family, right?” She was American, but her voice had something else, too, as if she might have been born in a country where they didn’t speak English.
