Black Lake (22 page)

On the third day, he had brought Kate into town for lunch. It was a mistake; people stared at them. It was certainly common knowledge what had happened to Philip, but John wondered whether they knew that Marianne had locked herself and Kate in the ballroom and that the police had paid a visit to Dulough. The Connollys wouldn’t have said anything, but it was possible that one of the gardaí had. He finished his food quickly and called for the bill as Kate was beginning the second half of her sandwich.

It was strange bringing her back to Dublin the following Sunday, the boot full of her things, her duvet across the backseat, everything exactly as it was when he’d driven her down the first time. Then, it was the end of the summer, the hedgerows still full of flowers, green after a wet August. When he brought her back the second time, it was the middle of October, and the early snowfall had dulled the countryside. She seemed more nervous than on the first trip; she chewed her fingernails, a new habit, and one he didn’t much like. He tried to make conversation, about friends she was looking forward to seeing again, about whether she would play hockey, about which teachers she liked, but her answers were monosyllabic. It was not behavior his father would have allowed of John when he was the same age.

When they got to the outskirts of Dublin, she spoke for the first time. “Can I go and see Mum this weekend?”

He hoped Kate hadn’t agreed to go back to school only to heighten the possibility of seeing her mother, because he wasn’t at all sure that Marianne would be well enough. He could phone his parents-in-law to ask, but he hadn’t heard from them in the week since they’d taken Marianne, other than a text message from Patrick to say that they had arrived safely after the journey and to try not to worry. John had seen finality in this, a clear message from Patrick and Anna that he should leave their daughter alone for the time being.

“I don’t think this weekend, no,” he told Kate.

She turned away from the window, towards him.

“I think Mum might need a little time to herself,” he said gently. “I’m sure it won’t be too long.”

When they pulled up in front of the dorms, a girl with black hair tied into a neat ponytail came out to meet them. She had obviously been waiting for Kate; he prayed it was her own idea and not the school’s—that his daughter would have at least one good friend here. As he heaved out her duvet and then opened the boot, the house mistress approached. John tried to remember her name as she gave Kate a hug. She smiled at John and took the duvet from him in a manner that suggested that he wasn’t invited into the girls’ dorms now that the semester was in full swing.

“All right,” he said to Kate, and kissed her awkwardly on the top of her head.

“Bye, Dad,” she said, as he got into the car.

She waved until he was out of sight. It was obvious that she was glad to be back. As he drove away from the school, he’d felt relieved, but when he reached Dulough’s gates, he found tears were on his cheeks. He wondered how long they’d been there.

There is no housework for him to do in preparation for Marianne’s return. Though it’s certainly not her job anymore, Mrs. Connolly has made the cottage spick-and-span. He tried to help. He is now adept at washing; he no longer forgets to take in the clothes from the line before they’re whipped away by the wind and go tumbling through the gorse. And he knows how to make himself a decent cooked breakfast. Simple stuff. He understands this, but these tasks fell to Marianne when they moved. It was no longer Mrs. Connolly’s duty to cook and clean for them. And John hadn’t thought to help his wife.

In the ballroom, Marianne had her own private housekeeping. He went up to dismantle their things the day after he returned Kate to school. Mrs. Connolly offered to help, but he had demurred; Marianne wouldn’t have liked it. She wouldn’t have wanted Mrs. Connolly to have such intimate contact with the life she’d created for herself and Kate. When Marianne first arrived at Dulough, she had hated that Mrs. Connolly went into their room, made their bed, put their clothes away. Their first argument as a married couple was when she insisted that he stop this practice, that Mrs. Connolly would clean the common areas of the big house, but that she, Marianne, would make their bed—and later the children’s beds—and take care of washing and ironing the family’s clothes. As he opened the door to the ballroom, he thought he could understand the intimacy of possessions. The moving men had made him feel something of what Marianne had felt in those early days.

He climbed the rough wooden stairs and passed through the space where the second door was before the policeman had demanded that it be taken off its hinges. The air was fresher than it had been a few weeks earlier. He wondered how this was possible; none of the windows opened. It mustn’t have been terribly good for them, all those days of stale air, he thought. He hoped it hadn’t done Kate any damage.

John had never been in the ballroom before the day they’d rescued Kate. He’d barely registered its existence, barely ever thought of it. The door had always been locked and he had always known that the key was in the safe. He and his brother had been told that the floors were unfinished, dangerous, but John was astonished to see that the room was much more complete than he had been led to believe, that there was a stairs one could climb quite easily, that there were two beautiful marble fireplaces. Marianne had been able to make them quite a comfortable apartment up there.

As he paused to get his breath at the top of the stairs, he was confronted with the painting on the end wall. It was Dulough itself, the house in the foreground, taller, much more gothic than in real life but a very close likeness. He bent down to look at the signature in the corner: Geoffrey Roe.

Over the front door, the rose was in bloom, but it didn’t climb as it did now. He looked more closely at the painting: Everything was newer, sharper, younger. It wasn’t just the house; the trees in the forest and at the foot of the garden were still in their infancy, the gardens newly laid out, the original flower bed designs clear, as if they’d just been lifted from the paper on which they’d been drawn. All that remained unchanged was the landscape; the hills were still steep and tall, precisely the same as they were today when he looked out the window in his study, and the lake was as black as he’d ever seen it. Like the scale of the house, the lake’s had been altered; it was larger than it was in real life. He noticed the same obsession with water he’d seen in the Water Women exhibit all those years earlier. The bath in which Olivia Campbell lay had also been elongated and brimming to the point of spilling over, so as to give Roe the opportunity to lavish attention on his presentation of the water itself.

John’s eyes traveled left, to the very edge of the trompe l’oeil, to the sea and to the island on which the church stood, the stained glass window still intact. Here, too, Roe had painted the water as brimming around the island, much further up the rocks than it went in reality. The whole painting gave the impression that Dulough might be engulfed at any moment, the lake rising to envelop the house, the sea covering the island, the land reclaimed, the work of his ancestor obliterated.

He made his way to the far end of the room and pulled the sheets off the bed. They were sour. He would wash them himself rather than allowing Mrs. Connolly to do it; that would please Marianne. He opened a chest that he recognized as having come from Philip’s old room. Inside, Kate’s and Marianne’s clothes were folded neatly; he took them out and put them in piles on the bed. At the bottom of the trunk, he came across some of Philip’s clothes, a green woolen jumper and blue corduroy trousers. A pair of shoes with the socks tucked neatly inside lay underneath. John sat down on the mattress with Philip’s clothes in his arms. He told himself that it wasn’t very strange, that all his things were still hanging in his cupboard in the cottage—neither he nor Marianne had made any move to change that. But he was disturbed at finding them here, the deliberateness of Marianne’s having chosen them and brought them up with her own things. Had Kate seen them? He hoped not.

On the writing desk, his daughter’s textbooks were lined up in alphabetical order, her copybooks stacked neatly, with each subject printed clearly on the front. He should have thought to bring these down with them to Dublin when he returned her to school yesterday. They would probably put a whole new set of textbooks on his bill, as well as the extra tutelage. He sat at the desk, knees knocking against the top, and opened Kate’s geography copybook. He had been heartened by the fact that Marianne was making sure that Kate did schoolwork, but he realized that much of it was work he’d already finished with the children a year ago. He leafed through Kate’s work. There was a drawing tucked into the back; it was the picture of the valley that Philip had done just after the move. John had returned to the cottage from a meeting with Foyle to find Philip upset about Marianne’s reaction to the gardeners digging up the lawn. John remembers his own anger at his wife for worrying about the garden rather than her son that afternoon.

In the ballroom, he looked at the geography book, at Kate’s copybook, at Philip’s drawing lined up side by side; why had Marianne been repeating work she knew the children had already done?

He worked late into the night; it was eleven o’clock before he dragged the last piece of furniture—Kate’s desk—down the stairs, returning it to the little bedroom at the end of the landing. He went back up to the ballroom with a torch to take a last look around; it looked exactly as it must have when Marianne first opened it up. He shone the light over Geoffrey Roe’s painting one last time; he was very sorry to leave this behind. Why had his parents never shown it to him? Had they known it was here? He wouldn’t tell Frank Foyle or Mr. Murphy about it; Roe was quite famous these days, and no doubt they would want visitors to be able to see it. But John wasn’t prepared to have strangers up here. He would keep the secret of the painting for him and for Marianne. Anyway, he told himself, he could come up and look at it any time he wanted; he was the one with the key.

When John got old, he hoped he would lose his memory, as his mother did, her mind like a cave disintegrating, powder falling from the ceiling cracks, water washing in at its mouth. He would forget the past year; he would be buried on the island. In a thousand years, Dulough wouldn’t exist anyway; it would be seed and memories of seed. Perhaps there would be another ice age. That would certainly have pleased Philip.

The day that Mrs. Connolly phoned him at college to tell him that his mother was dying, John came back from the city as fast as he could, but it was too late. She was upstairs, laid out on her bed, looking for all the world as if she might open her eyes and ask for some tea. They tried to bury her a couple days later. Three men from the funeral home in town arrived to help carry the coffin out to the island, just as they had for Philip’s funeral. But John had miscalculated the tides; when they got down to the beach, sea still surrounded the island. It had already been difficult getting down the cliff path; John, who was carrying the front of his mother’s coffin, his left arm extended to grip his brother’s shoulder, had felt the weight inside shift as they made their way down the steep path. He could tell that even the smallest amount of water lapping at their ankles could unbalance them, and so he announced that they should turn back and wait. He avoided the men as Mrs. Connolly fed them around the kitchen table, though they were probably very glad of her cooking. Phil went up to his old bedroom in disgust, a man of the city with no time for mistakes such as this.

John had sat in the upstairs drawing room window for a couple of hours, squinting at the island, watching for the last of the sea to be sucked out and hidden behind it before he went down to the kitchen to fetch the men for a second attempt. One of them joked quietly that it was as well they’d had a trial run anyway, with the way down to the beach being so steep. But John knew that was nothing compared to the rocks at the foot of the island, which they would have to maneuver his mother across slowly. If the tide came back in too soon they’d all be there for the night. Afterwards, he tried to convince Francis that the grave could wait to be filled until the next morning, when it was properly light again. His mother wouldn’t have wanted Francis to risk being stranded. He gave a nod and turned away, but John knew that he didn’t think he was much of a son to leave his mother’s coffin down there, covered for the night with nothing but an old piece of plywood and some plastic sheeting.

Phil had done nothing to help prepare for their mother’s funeral. He treated the three days after she died as if they were a test of his forbearance. He wouldn’t take responsibility for the notice in the paper or for phoning relatives. What it was exactly about Dulough that Phil couldn’t stand eluded John, but it was clear that not even their mother’s death could change these feelings. Phil remained in his room except at mealtimes and muttered
work
under his breath when he disappeared again after pudding.

A few years earlier, when Phil had taken a job at a law practice in Dublin, their mother had called him and then John into the drawing room one evening after Christmas, the only time Phil came home. His mother hadn’t said what passed between her and John’s elder brother that allowed her to announce that the estate would go to John, but it didn’t come as a surprise. In many ways, Phil’s behavior during the days between her death and funeral was an extreme version of the way that he had been behaving for a long time, first as a teenager, then as a student. Everything about him was at odds with Dulough: his impatience, his disdain for nature, his interest in money. John supposed that it had been clear to his parents from quite early on that Phil was much more like Olivia’s son, Duncan, who’d eschewed his father’s Irish estate in favor of setting up a legal practice in Edinburgh. And so John’s mother did what Olivia had done and left the estate to someone who really wanted it.