Black Lake (19 page)

She went for long walks on her own (she takes after her father). Once, she came back wet to the thigh from where she’d stepped in a bog hole. Another time, after getting soaked by the rain, she stayed out and came back hours later, an awful cold already in her lungs. I was happy when she had to stay in bed. My poor, captive child.

But the moment her temperature dropped, she was up and out and gone for a whole afternoon. When she got in, looking pale and sick again, I read her the riot act and we were back to square one. We were no longer friends, but I desperately wanted to ask whether she felt what I was feeling. Oh, I know that mothers love especially, but how do twelve-year-old sisters love, and do they feel their own form of despair?

She phoned the evening John left her at the school. She said that everything was
fine.
Fine,
a word he probably told her to use, a word meant to put her mother’s mind at rest. He was right to tell me to stay at home; there would have been a scene. I waited in the cottage, poking at the fire, eating over the sink, drawing the curtains against the darkness. When I look in the mirror these days, I don’t think it would be unfair to call myself gaunt, my neck becoming thin and stringy before its time, my hips protruding, sharp, like the shoulders of a bat. My tummy the same, a fold of flesh that arrived with the children.

I lay on the couch and thought about putting on a video. John had been considerate in his choices, avoiding anything that smacked of death. I wondered whether he would watch them with me now that Kate was gone.

The school told us that she was only allowed phone calls home at weekends. There was no time on a weekday, what with classes and games and dinner and prep. Besides, they found that students settled in better if they weren’t talking to their parents every night. It stopped them from
bonding
(not my word) with their peers. I imagined the French teacher as being responsible for all this, the inventor of all these rules.

The next morning, I sealed up a letter to Kate, full of easy harmless chatter, and drove straight into town, despite the fact that it was early and that I’d hours until the post went.

Then I slipped into John’s study. It was a Monday, the only day that Dulough was closed to visitors, so I had the place to myself. I realize now that what I was looking for was another secret. I hadn’t known that John was plotting to send Kate away to school, and I wanted to find out if he was hiding anything else, another horrible surprise that this time I might be able to prepare myself for.

The painting of Philip the First looked as if it was about to fall off the wall. Before I righted it, I stared at him, and for the first time saw a resemblance to my husband. It wasn’t in the nose or in the chin, or in any of the usual features that connote family resemblance. It was something else: I saw ownership, not just of land but of history, a firm ownership of their own history.

Straightening the painting, I found the safe behind. I tried the year Dulough was built, then Kate’s, then Philip’s, birthday. It swung open. Did he change that since? I wondered. Or had he been John’s favorite and I’d never realized? First I looked for correspondence from the school, but it was obvious there was nothing from them; everything they sent was stiff, glossy, nestled into expensive-looking folders. Instead, the safe was full of little jewel-colored notebooks, stacks and stacks of what I soon discovered to be Olivia Campbell’s diaries.

The oldest diary began in the mid-eighteen hundreds, while she and the first Philip were staying at Lough Power, still a guesthouse then. Her husband is scouting about for cheap land to buy, and Olivia is dismayed at the prospect of leaving Edinburgh, where she has just learnt to live. She has only recently stopped pining for England, for her family home in London, for summers on the south coast. And now Philip wants to come here. But it was not the age of women defying their husbands, especially not husbands like hers.

That afternoon, Kate’s first day of school, I flipped through weeks and then years of Olivia’s life. Her fear at being trapped here: “I look into the distance and see nothing man-made, nothing to break the endless fields but mountains and more mountains.” Then the acceptance, and finally, once the house was built and the gardens laid out, a love of the place that rivals even John’s. After five years at Dulough she “cannot imagine living anywhere else,” and, when she visits her family on holiday, “Cornwall has been usurped in my heart by Donegal. Nothing can compare to a day here, when it has recently rained, when the clouds scud away over the sea, when the sky is silvery and the sun comes out. I go walking through the glen, the air so fresh, the only sound the waterfall in the distance. To come back to one’s own warm drawing room, to a pot of tea, and the knowledge that one will sleep soundly that night, this has become the closest thing to heaven on earth for me.”

One of the diaries had a piece of newspaper sticking out of it, which someone had been using as a bookmark. I began to read from there, curious why the reader before me had chosen to signal this particular page of Olivia’s writings as significant.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, she began to worry who would inherit Dulough. Her son, Duncan, wasn’t showing much interest in the estate; he had his law practice in Edinburgh, a house in the New Town. He wouldn’t come to Donegal unless his mother made him. In 1885, Olivia invited her extended family for a weeklong visit, but it was really a grand interview. They all came, except for a nephew who worked for the British government in Ceylon. Olivia’s guests didn’t know that such a large inheritance was at stake when they dutifully took trains and boats and ponies and traps all the way from their corners of England to the far northwest of Ireland. They turned up pale and exhausted, horrified at the length of a journey to a country that on the maps had seemed so close.

In the preceding month, Olivia had hired, and trained herself, a dozen or so young locals to act as footmen. Her English guests were met by these Irish boys, who swung the cases and trunks off the back of carriages in wide arcs, no bother to them after the weight of the turf they were forced to lug on a daily basis. They showed the guests to their rooms and announced in tones they hoped were posh enough, intelligible enough to English people, that they were very welcome to Ireland.

As many activities as possible had been planned to keep her guests occupied that week. There were shooting parties for the men and there was tennis for the women. They had picnics in the little glass summerhouse at the top of the cliffs, which was gone well before my time. And there was the option of swimming in the sea, although Olivia notes that no one was brave enough for the North Atlantic, being used to places like Cornwall, which was practically France, after all. Perhaps that, too, was one of her tests. She knew that one has to be hardy to survive up here. But then again, I wouldn’t have called myself hardy when I arrived; I’d have picked another word, naive perhaps, idealistic certainly. Are they the same thing? But I suppose hardiness can be learnt.

On the last night, Olivia had a party. She invited her closest friends—the Turner-Adamses, the Williamses, the Whitneys, and her nearest neighbor, Geoffrey Roe—to meet her family, and to help her judge who best to leave the estate to. She also invited her late husband’s cousin, Dulough’s architect, Charles Wrenn-Harris, telling him firmly that it was about time he saw his handiwork.

Olivia stood outside the dining room as they went in to dinner. Geoffrey Roe hung back. He had soft hair, the color of marmalade, which she suspected he cut himself, and pale, pale freckled skin. He looked like the descendant of Vikings, but he’d not one ounce of Norse blood in him, he said regretfully.

“Mr. Roe.”

“Olivia…”—he stood back, taking her in—“…very pretty.”

It was the first time he’d called her by her Christian name.
Very pretty,
words for a girl, but she’d accept them. She had been old with her husband, and these days she did almost feel as if she were getting younger.

A year earlier, Olivia had received a letter from Geoffrey Roe. He had heard about her magnificent gardens and wondered if it would be presumptuous to ask if he might come and paint them one day. He arrived the following week, carrying an easel and a paint box. His only request was an empty jam jar, which she watched him fill from the fountain and place unsteadily on the grass beside him. It flushed rhododendron pink, sea blue, leaf green. When he was finished, he knocked on the kitchen door and asked if he might have some gin. And a little tonic, if it wasn’t too much trouble.

Though she had not invited him, he turned up weekly that summer, always unannounced, always in the same outfit, the jam jar retrieved from a recess in the garden wall. Sometimes she watched him as he painted, from the bay window in the upstairs drawing room. On his fourth or fifth visit, she met him at the back door, gin for both of them, and invited him inside. But it was a lovely evening, he said, why not sit in the summerhouse? In the outdoor room, the glass doors flung open to the sunset, their knees covered in blankets, he told her that these midges were nothing compared to the mosquitoes of his travels, which had eaten him alive, which had given him the taste for gin, the need for quinine.

His weekly visits stopped as soon as winter came, though the estate was beautiful in the snow, though she would not have minded at all if he had painted from one of the upstairs windows. She wanted to tell him this, but couldn’t quite work out how—a letter, a visit, a message brought by one of her servants? And then she overheard one day in April that he was back at Lough Power. “Back?” she couldn’t help but ask. Mr. Roe had spent the winter in London. And why should he have thought of telling her? Still, when he arrived the following week, when he retrieved the jar from the wall, when the water ran out because it had frozen again and again, the ice having cracked the glass, she let the housekeeper find him another one, as she hid in the scullery, listening.

But the next time he turned up, she hadn’t had anyone but the servants to talk to for weeks. She couldn’t help but venture out onto the avenue and invite him inside for something to eat when he had finished painting.

As I read, it became clear to me that when Olivia dressed on the evening of her party, choosing her gown carefully, taking longer than usual over her hair, the knowledge that Geoffrey Roe was coming had preoccupied her almost as much as the house’s future. He put his hand on her back as they went in to dinner, and she worried briefly that her family would see, that they would guess—but what of it, she thought, what of it?

After the party, Geoffrey Roe became a daily visitor to Dulough. One afternoon, as the days were getting short, he demanded to be taken out to the island. He leapt over the rocks at its base as if he were a man in his twenties rather than, she guessed, his sixties, a decade she had just entered herself. When she caught up, he was in the churchyard, looking at her husband’s grave.

“That space under his name is for yours, I take it.”

She had been standing precisely there as he was buried. When the ground was consecrated, Philip had imagined a Campbell dynasty, the graveyard filling up with his descendants, but she intended to leave Dulough to her sister’s son, not their own. Her husband would have been disappointed in her decision—and in their son for his lack of interest in the estate—but what she cared about now was that someone would love Dulough as much as she did. Besides, there would still be plenty of money for Duncan to inherit.

As they came back over the rocks, Geoffrey fell, his right leg disappearing into a hole, his body twirling backwards. He pulled himself slowly up on his elbows and looked down at his foot, which was trapped. First he pulled gently, then hard, holding his thigh with both hands, as if trying to free himself from the jaws of an animal.

Olivia watched. To have offered help or advice to her husband in such a situation would have ensured his fury.

“Well, come on,” said Geoffrey Roe. “Give me a hand, won’t you?”

“Shouldn’t I get Thom?”

“And risk the tide coming in? It would be over my head. Your gardener wouldn’t do me much good then, would he?”

She bent down to examine his foot. It was wedged between two rocks at a strange angle. He craned his neck to look at what she was doing. Her hands encircled his calf and pulled up, hard. Geoffrey let out a loud breath, but that was it, as if he had broken all manner of things in the past and knew that this was necessary. Not for the first time, she wondered what his life had been before this.

He would be off his feet for a good while, the doctor said. Olivia’s maid, Áine, confided in her mistress that there were no servants at Lough Power, only a washerwoman who came once a month. Who cooked for him? No one, he “cooked” for himself. Olivia was incredulous. It was clear that he couldn’t return to Lough Power on his own, so she put him in the bedroom with the best view of the island, the bedroom in which I’d spent my first visit to Dulough, to remind him that those rocks should never be scaled recklessly.

Though he was well enough by the week before Christmas to return to his own home, Olivia persuaded him that the house would be too cold and that he should remain at Dulough into the new year. Secretly, she had sent Thom to assess the state of his house. He returned with stories of paper peeling off walls and of mice in the kitchen. She wasn’t surprised; the land began the process of reclamation quickly. She had learnt this when Philip’s tenants were evicted; one of the cottages, which had belonged to a family of women, disintegrated quickly, grass growing in the thatch, the garden going to seed, until the roof collapsed less than a year after the family left.