Black Lake (15 page)

Philip came out from behind the plant. He was afraid of her in a way he would not have been if she were a normal size.

“Philip, right?” She waved a glossy piece of paper at him. “I’ve read the brochure. How goes it?”

He stood by her table with his hands in his pockets. “I don’t know,” he said honestly.

“Why don’t you sit down and have something to eat?”

He eyed the plate of cucumber sandwiches; he hadn’t managed to find any extra ones after Frank Foyle’s speech. Sliding into the chair opposite, he smiled shyly. “Thank you.”

She took a bite out of her cream-covered scone and pushed the rest of them towards him. “And these are for you when you’re done.”

The fat lady didn’t seem concerned whether he talked or not. She looked contentedly out the window as he finished two sandwiches. When he reached for a scone, she said, “You want something to drink?” and nodded in the direction of the serving table. He wasn’t sure if it was polite to say yes.

“Why don’t you get yourself a soda or something?” She handed him a five-pound note. “Will that be enough?”

“Oh,” Philip explained, “I don’t need to pay. It’s my house.”

The lady looked at him for a moment, her head cocked to one side, like a parrot’s.

“Okay.” She put the money back in her handbag.

One of the waitresses was assembling a tea tray for a visitor. Philip ducked behind the serving table and took a paper cup from a stack by a silver machine that said Coca-Cola on it. He eased the plastic lever forwards and let the black liquid fall into the cup.

“Philip!” Mrs. Connolly said from the kitchen.

Coke went all over his shoes and socks. He looked down at his feet and then up at her. She was beside him now, throwing a tea towel on the floor to mop up the mess. “What are you
do
ing,
alannah?
”

“Getting a drink.”

“This is a restaurant now—you can’t just help yourself. People have to pay here. The money goes to the government, to Mr. Murphy.” Her voice trailed off as she got down on her hands and knees to wipe the floor.

Philip knew that the whole room had heard what she’d said. He couldn’t look over at the lady who’d given him the sandwiches, though he realized that she must be watching. A wave of anger at Mrs. Connolly rose in him as she swabbed at his feet. He wanted to hurt her while she was down there; he could kick her, he could stand on her hands. Instead, he turned and ran out the conservatory door, shoes sticking to the tiles.

He ran through the kitchen garden, past tourists with umbrellas, doing their best to ignore the downpour. Soon he was out the door in the red-brick wall and into open land. He followed a path overgrown with rhododendrons and passed a sign:
PLEASE
DO
NOT
GO
BEYOND
THIS
POINT
.
The grass was wet and knee-high; the water soaked through his trousers and took the stickiness from his shoes. His face was wet too. Putting his hand to his cheeks, he wiped as roughly as he could. He climbed up the hill, making for the forest. Under the leaves he was protected from the rain. He could slow down now, catch his breath. Sitting on the roots of a big tree, he waited.

When his heart slowed and his breathing returned to its usual pace, he was able to hear the rain dripping through the leaves and the wind rushing around the edge of the forest, trying to find its way in. He walked along the path. The little labels on green spikes had been put back. He wondered how they’d managed to find where he’d stashed them.
Pinus contorta:
lodgepole pine, he said to himself. Did they know it was him who’d pulled them all up? He didn’t care now anyway.

A wood pigeon called out eerily from somewhere in the branches above him. He ran on, his feet falling soundlessly on the wood-chip path. He burst out the other side of the forest, where the cliffs fell away to the sea, and the grabbing claws of the peninsulas stretched left and right. It had stopped raining and the sun had come out.

Scrambling down the cliff path, his shoes filling with sand, Philip left the festivities behind him—his mother, father, and Kate, Mrs. Connolly, Mr. Foyle, Mr. Murphy, the visitors, the gardeners with their John Player Blues—and headed for the island.

There were no jellyfish on the beach this time, but last night’s weather had washed up great mounds of bladderwrack, black and smelling to high heaven, with little crabs wriggling in it, making busy circles around it. Philip was careful not to step on them; the crunch of shell and gray meat was something to be avoided.

The tide was well in; it ran up the sand and retreated again, like a game. But it advanced a little every time and the little was more than you thought. He checked the headland to make sure he wasn’t being watched. Scanning the cliffs like a soldier with binoculars, he could see the top of the marquee, its roof gathering into a point like a big top.

When he got to the water’s edge, he took off his shoes. He tied the laces together and slung them over his shoulders. He rolled up his trousers. It wouldn’t be enough; he could see that the water was deeper than that around the island.

The sea was cold, of course, bitingly, gaspingly cold. But he was used to it. He moved out, ankle-, then knee-high. Over the rolled-up bottoms of his trousers, to his thighs, his groin, his small hips and protruding tummy button. He kept his arms lifted until the last second, for it was only when the sea reached your chest that the cold fully entered your body. He knew this. But so does anyone who swims in Donegal.

And his shoulders, finally down, underwater, his arms working, breaststroke, pulling forwards, the current underneath, water churned up from the interruption of the island, pulling at his legs, his heart beating fast like in the forest, his breath the loudest thing in his ears, louder than the Atlantic even.

Summer

Marianne

At
college, I had seen John around for a few years before we started going out together. There were things that made him different: his shirts with their frayed collars, the fact that he sometimes wore a tie, his carefully combed hair. He was always on the edge of everything, peering in, as if the rest of us were exotic fish he longed to swim with. He was otherworldly, if that’s not too grand a word.

One evening in third year, we ended up at the same party. It was me who approached him. I knew his name already and he knew mine, but we pretended not to, because to have admitted it would have been to acknowledge how strange it was that we’d never spoken before.

I was going to say we drifted together, but I know now it isn’t true. I thought it was a funny coincidence that after the party I started seeing him everywhere. Then I worked out that it was no coincidence; he’d engineered the whole thing. Knowing John as I do now, I’m still surprised he was so forward; he even turned up in my lectures. Within a few months, we were sharing a bed.

The assurance with which he kissed me and brought me upstairs in his little student flat didn’t give away the fact that he was a virgin. It’s not as if I really knew what I was doing on that front, either; there’d been a few guys in college, but not enough of them for me to really have any sort of head start. We’ve never talked about this directly. I’ve never said that I know I was his first and he’s never admitted it to me. Not that it matters much, I suppose.

From our first conversation, I knew he was from Donegal. I’d only been there once, as a child. I remembered a very long rainy holiday, where even my resourceful parents despaired of the weather. We never went back. Instead, our summers were spent in France, camping, the car packed to bursting and loaded onto the ferry.

John was careful in those first months not to tell me the truth about his background. “Dulough” was a word he used often, and even though my brain did an automatic translation from the Irish, I never thought to ask why his house was called “Black Lake.” Where he was from was beside the point then. Our world was making toast together in the mornings before one of us ran off to a lecture, meeting in the pub for lunch, sitting side by side in the library, and then my favorite part of the day, cooking dinner in the evenings. I had never thought of myself as having any sort of domestic aspirations, but I loved it.

When John announced that he thought it was time I visit Dulough, I was flattered that he wanted to show me where he was from. By that stage, he’d been to my parents’ often for dinner. My mother could see that I was quite serious about him, so she wasn’t worried about my disappearing for a week of the Easter holidays up to Donegal with my “young man,” as my father called him.

The drive up was great fun, just the two of us in his car, leaving the city, stopping for sandwiches, zipping through all those little towns in the middle of Ireland, where you’d wonder how people didn’t die of ennui (that was the sort of word I might have been guilty of using then), and through the border. The soldiers made us completely unpack the car whilst they searched it. When I asked them jokingly how we looked suspicious, one of them fixed me with a stare and insisted it was random. But it upset me, the whole thing. I’d never been through the North before, and I felt exposed, having our possessions removed from John’s car and laid out beside it. Not that they’d opened our bags, not that they’d been anything but polite, but it soured the journey for me, and I asked John if he’d ever thought of going around by Sligo to avoid that sort of thing.

“Actually, that’s never happened before,” he assured me, bemused at my indignation. “They have a pretty awful life,” he added.

I felt I was being rebuked for my reaction. I was quiet all the way through Enniskillen and well past the border between Fermanagh and Donegal. For the first time I was rethinking our relationship. I was angry at him for his calm forbearance as the soldiers searched his car, at his diffident smile, at his lack of understanding as to why it had made me feel so strange. My anger grew the further we went. I considered telling him that I’d changed my mind, that he should turn the car around. I wanted to go back to Dublin.

But there’s a point, somewhere in Donegal, where you suddenly realize you’ve left everything behind. You’re on a road in the middle of nowhere, turf bogs on either side, and beyond them, the steep sides of a valley. No one dares to build there anymore; only the ruins of Famine houses appear now and again. There are no trees, and the earth has a scorched look to it, as if a fire passed through a long time ago. Later I learnt that the fire was wind.

I still don’t know whether it was by design, so eager was he that I see the Poison Glen at its best, that we turned onto that road when dusk was beginning. I simply forgot I was angry with him, the landscape was so beautiful. At the end of the road, a set of gates loomed ahead of us. John got out of the car and dragged them open. I wanted to help, but he waved at me to stay in the car. He was well used to opening them, I could see that. I’d no idea until that moment what he’d come from. I knew there were people like him hidden around the countryside, but I hadn’t given them a moment’s thought in my life.

I remember my heart convulsing slightly when he turned onto the avenue and drove along by the lake, before bringing the car to a halt in front of the house with as little ceremony as possible. All his actions were muted, as if he was trying to use his body to offset the grandeur of the place itself. He turned to me nervously. “Here we are.” Unlike the landscape, the house itself wasn’t so much beautiful as it was imposing. I looked from John to the place he’d grown up and tried to reconcile the two. The impression he gave of being a little cut off from everyone else in Dublin made sense now. I could see that he was very different from us, that his experience of Ireland had not been our experience, that we’d grown up in different countries. But of course that realization was subconscious. All I consciously felt was fear. I was the one in my element in Dublin; without any warning, the tables had been turned.

“Well, come on then,” he said, and went around to open the boot. While his back was to the front door of the house, a woman emerged. It was Mrs. Connolly, more robust then, straight backed. The arthritis that took up residence in later years had not yet arrived. She opened the door with such authority that I forgot John’s mother had died and assumed it must be her. John turned when he heard the sound of the door opening, dropped our bags on the gravel, and went to greet her. She rebuffed his embrace kindly and instead stood still, holding each of his hands in her own, arms outstretched, so that she could get a good look at him. Then her head popped to one side and found my gaze through the car window.

It was unfortunate, I recognize now, that the first time I met her, I had only just realized what a grand boyfriend I had, because my face must still have registered the shock. John introduced me, not as his girlfriend but as his “friend,” Marianne. This startled me anew. It felt like a double rejection; on top of the fact that it was possible I might not be posh enough to have a boyfriend with a house like this, he was suddenly unsure I was his girlfriend. Of course I understood later, as I became more accustomed to his world, that he never would have said “girlfriend” at Dulough, it would have been too forward, would have suggested too much. I wish I’d understood that at the time, though.