Black Lake (24 page)

In the hall, John called out his wife’s, then his daughter’s, name, still convinced of the futility of looking for them there.

“They won’t be in the kitchen,” Francis said. “Mary would have seen them before she came down.”

Francis began to ascend the stairs. John followed. He noticed that Francis didn’t call their names; even at a moment like this, it would have seemed presumptuous. On the landing, the older man paused, turning his head left and right. There were no lights on in any of the bedrooms; that much was obvious. They could see under every door from their vantage point at the top of the staircase, and both of them knew Marianne well enough to understand that she wouldn’t stay in a room with a light off, not on her own, and certainly not with Kate. John was getting frustrated; why couldn’t Francis see they weren’t there? They must be outside somewhere—it wasn’t completely dark yet. He wanted to find Marianne as soon as possible, to know what she was playing at, why she’d taken Kate out of school without consulting him first. He turned to go back downstairs, but Francis grabbed him by the sleeve and inclined his head heavenward.

“Up there,” he said.

John thought for a moment that the old man, usually so rational and resolute, was losing his grip on reality.

“What do you mean?”

“They’re up in that ballroom.”

John led the way to the study, where he searched the safe for the key. At the door to the ballroom, John knocked first quietly, then loudly. He still didn’t quite believe that his wife and daughter were on the other side. Francis stood back.

Kate came as soon as he knocked.

“Dad?”

He tried to glean whether she sounded afraid, but the wood muffled her voice.

“Is Mum there?”

Then he heard a floorboard creak; it was Marianne, telling their daughter to go back to bed. John tried to talk to her, to get her to open the door, but Francis shook his head. Francis and Marianne often spent hours in the gardens together, bent over one plant or another; perhaps the older man knew her better than John had realized. Francis whispered that it was best to leave them alone for the moment.

After John asked Kate whether she was hungry and reassured her that they’d be back in the morning, the two men went to the Connollys’ cottage, where John allowed Francis to explain to Mrs. Connolly what had happened. John could see that Mrs. Connolly didn’t approve of leaving Kate up there for the night, but she always deferred to her husband’s judgment. She agreed to make Marianne and Kate a breakfast tray the next morning whilst John worked out what to do.

The following day, when John brought up the meal that Mrs. Connolly had prepared for them, he watched, hidden behind a pillar at the top of the stairs, as Marianne, still in her long nightgown, opened the door. What had he been planning to do, he wondered, as she stooped to pick up the tray—grab it from her, force his way in? He couldn’t allow Kate to see something so upsetting, and so he’d stayed quiet, thinking that the only thing to do was acquiesce until Marianne came to her senses. After three meals, Mrs. Connolly seemed to accept that this was how things had to be for the time being. She began to prepare the trays without being asked.

It was because of the lucidity of Marianne’s letter that John gave no thought to whether his wife had changed from being the woman he’d always known to someone else, someone who wasn’t to be trusted with their remaining child. Because he himself had needed to keep his study, because as soon as he’d seen Philip’s hut, he’d recognized the same impulse in his son, there had been no more logical statement than Marianne’s that she needed somewhere too. And because Marianne had always known what was best for the children, he assumed she knew what was best for Kate now, that he had been wrong about the school, and that Marianne was righting the damage he had done to Kate. In fact, in their first few weeks in the ballroom, John was much more concerned with concealing what was going on from Bríd, the tour guide, and from Mr. Murphy. Fortunately, the tours were tapering away, the summer season over. When the house closed in mid-September for the winter, John was relieved.

But one morning, after a heavy frost, he discovered an uneaten breakfast tray outside the door to the ballroom. It was the first time that the food Mrs. Connolly had prepared hadn’t been eaten. He knocked, but there was no answer, so he picked up the tray and brought it back to the kitchen. He waited until he heard Mrs. Connolly go into the scullery, and then he quickly dumped the contents into the bin, covering it with other scraps. If the old woman found out that Kate had missed a meal she’d be very worried. In the weeks since his wife and daughter had retreated to the ballroom, Mrs. Connolly had said little about the new arrangement, but he knew that as the husband and, moreover, as the owner of Dulough, she thought he should put his foot down.
Enough of this nonsense
was what she was thinking.

That lunchtime, he hovered outside the kitchen. When she emerged with the lunch tray, he swooped out of the shadows of the passageway, scaring her to the point of almost dropping it. “I’ll take that up today, thank you, Mrs. Connolly.” When he got to the door to the ballroom, he laid the tray on the ground and rapped on the door. “There’s your lunch,” he said, loudly. He wanted Marianne to know that it wasn’t Mrs. Connolly who’d brought it but him, and that he would notice if it wasn’t eaten. But Marianne had never been the slightest bit afraid of him.

Then he sat in his study, chair swiveled towards the valley, frost covering the land all the way down to the lake. The lake itself was darker than he’d ever seen it, as if it was deepening as the years went by, the bottom falling away and away. One night, when they were still in the big house, they had woken to cries coming from Philip’s bedroom. He and Marianne ran down the corridor and into their son’s room. The cries were coming from his sleep. Marianne sat down by Philip’s bed and gently rubbed his arm until he stopped. When she was satisfied that the nightmare was over, she led John back to bed, but he wasn’t able to sleep. What sort of terror had gripped Philip? John never remembered having dreams like that himself. When Marianne was asleep again, he had slipped out of their bed and returned to his son’s room. He sat in the chair in the corner, his dressing gown over him as a blanket, watching Philip’s sleeping form.

When he woke in the morning, Philip was standing next to him in his striped pajamas, looking bewildered. John took him on his lap and asked if he remembered what he had dreamt about. The lake, Philip had said, a monster. John looked away. He had been the one to tell him about the Loch Ness Monster a few days previously, and to show him those grainy photos of a tiny dinosaurlike head poking out of the cold waters of the bottomless lake. John had explained to Philip at the time that it was in Scotland and that there were no monsters in their own lake, and though he had seen that Philip had understood, his little imagination must have conflated the two lakes as he slept. The guilt John had felt lasted for a long time. Marianne would never have made such a mistake.

He wondered whether Philip had been scared of what was in the water on the day he died. Both he and Marianne had been keen to ensure that their children weren’t afraid of the sea. They had taught Kate and Philip to swim at a young age, to reassure them that there was nothing in their Atlantic to harm them, that there were plenty of creatures to love: crabs, starfish, mussels, limpets. But perhaps they should have instilled a fear of the water into their children. To John’s knowledge they had never explained what an undertow was, they had never warned Kate and Philip that the water could suck you down, could suck even grown-up swimmers down.

Until then, John had not allowed himself to think about the end of his son’s life. Philip had rolled up his trousers, so he must have thought that he would be able to wade to the island. It would have been very cold, the sea still wintry. He imagined him, eyes fixed on the island, wading forwards with determination. Had the point come when Philip knew that he wouldn’t make it? What had it been like to feel the pull of the current, a current that John and Marianne had made sure the children had never experienced? John realized that he himself had no idea, even after all the years of sea-bathing, what a strong undertow felt like. He hoped that Philip hadn’t known what was happening, that he believed to the last second that he was going to get to the island, where he would be able to hide in his hut until the strangers had left Dulough.

He couldn’t stand to think about it anymore, so he’d gone to see whether Kate and Marianne had eaten their lunch. Surely they would be starving after having missed breakfast. But when he got to the ballroom door, he found their tray again untouched. He knocked loudly.

Kate came to the other side.

“Enough,” he said.

He heard Kate’s footsteps disappear back into the vast space. A few moments of silence, then a sound that he first thought was coming from somewhere else in the house, below him, Mrs. Connolly hoovering, perhaps. A wave of irritation passed over him that he couldn’t hear properly what was happening on the other side of the door. Then he realized, as the sound got louder, that it was a human sound.

Kate returned.

“What’s that?” he asked, alarmed.

“It’s Mum.”

It was the only moment in his life that John remembered having lost control. He bent down and picked up first one bowl of soup, then another, and hurled them at the door, then the plates, the sandwiches, hitting the door, sliding down revoltingly. Everything lay in a pile: broken crockery, food, milk, coffee, soup. The next thing he knew, he was sitting in the kitchen, with Mrs. Connolly cleaning his cuts and mopping at the splatters on his clothes, and he was looking up at her, hands outstretched, as he often had as a child when he’d fallen or fought with his brother.

As soon as she was finished, he had gone to the phone in the hall, though he wasn’t supposed to use it anymore, and dialed his parents-in-law’s number in Dublin. Marianne’s mother answered.

“Anna,” he said. For an awful moment, he thought he was going to cry. He took a breath.

“John?”

“Anna, do you think you and Patrick might be able to come up?”

“Why?” He heard the panic in her voice and instantly regretted not telling her that Marianne and Kate were all right.

“It’s difficult to explain, but Marianne has, well, locked herself away.”

“Where? In the house?”

He paused; he had never really thought of the ballroom as part of the house. But he supposed it
was
in the house, as much a part of the house as any other room. That was comforting; it made Marianne and Kate seem less far away than they had, and he wondered whether he’d been too hasty in phoning her.

“Yes. In the ballroom.”

“Why?”

She didn’t wait for him to answer.

“We’ll leave now,” she said.

And John wondered, when he put down the phone, what Marianne’s mother and father would think of him when they realized that he’d let this happen. But it was only after Marianne was taken away that he fully realized how inept he’d been. How long would he have let it go on, he had asked himself many times since, if others hadn’t stepped in and done what needed to be done?

A movement on the headland interrupts his thoughts. He doesn’t know how long he’s been sitting out here on the island, the cold having made good progress through his bones.

Someone has come to the end of the garden. It’s impossible to tell from this distance whether the figure is male or female, but he can see a face, looking out to sea. It must be Francis; Mrs. Connolly wouldn’t leave the kitchen for a walk at this hour. He supposes it could be one of the gardeners or the people from the government, but they always travel in packs. He stays completely still, hoping he blends into the darkness of the ruins behind him. The figure turns, vanishing back into the trees.

At any rate, it’s time to go. He wants to pick some flowers from Marianne’s garden for the kitchen table, so that she’ll see them when she gets in. She has insisted on driving back up from Dublin herself, and though he was disappointed that she didn’t want him to collect her, he supposes that she wants to prove she’s better, that she’s ready to return to life on the estate.

He makes his way down the rocks at the foot of the island and over the beach. When he reaches the bottom of the cliff path, someone calls his name. Marianne is walking towards him. “I’ve been looking for you for ages. The traffic wasn’t too bad.”

“You’re back,” he says.

She’s already got her gardening clothes on. He thinks about the figure who came to the edge of the cliff, and matches it now to Marianne in her old coat and mud-stained trousers. The pale smear in the distance had been her face, scanning the horizon for his.

Behind her, the house looks exactly as it did before the opening and for a moment he allows himself to believe that the visitors never came, that Philip is still alive, that the year passed uneventfully, the same as all the years that went before.

Acknowledgments

Black Lake
is also dedicated to the memory of Joyce Power-Steele (1909–2009) of Portnoo, Co. Donegal.

Those who know Donegal may recognize that Dulough is loosely based on Glenveagh. I hope readers will forgive the liberties I’ve taken with its history and geography.