Black Lake (5 page)

“Having some work done?” Owen Mór says, as soon as the men are close enough to hear each other above the wind. He does not seem at all embarrassed being caught on someone else’s land. John looks down at the house, but the lorry and the van have disappeared into the trees at the end of the avenue. It is easiest to say yes, but as soon as he does, Owen Mór’s lips bend into a half smile. He should have remembered that the old farmer is thick with Frank Foyle, the local county councillor in charge of turning Dulough into a tourist attraction. Owen Mór seems to recognize this knowledge in John and tries again. “That’ll be the movers, then?”

“Yes, I think so.”

If Owen Mór is wondering what John is doing all the way up here, he doesn’t mention it. “Nice morning, so it is.”

He turns away and walks on across the top of the ridge in the direction of the sea. John watches him disappear over the hill. He climbs the few more steps it takes to get to the top, the knife-edge of the ridge, which the older man had taken like a mountain goat a few moments before. John hasn’t been up here in years, since before the children were born, perhaps, and he is surprised to discover that he is more afraid than he was as a younger man—that the possibility of falling now seems quite real.

He sees the land around him as if he were on a plane. The world outside Dulough is a series of messy fields, Lough Power a vast green pool in the distance. Green, not black; it is much shallower than John’s own lake. The English artist Edward Steele lives at Lough Power now, finally having claimed his great-grandfather’s house after it had been left uninhabited for so long. Unlike his ancestor Geoffrey Roe, who was a painter, Steele works in wood and metal. He has placed sculptures in the shallow waters of the lough, a hollow dolphin and a larger-than-life salmon. John has always meant to ask if he could bring Kate and Philip to see the iron fish in the water.

It is still early in the morning and he knows that the movers are likely to be around all day. He is cold; he has had nothing to eat. But he’s well used to walking, and his legs keep moving whether he wills them to or not. He follows the top of the ridge north, away from the sea, naming the geographical features as he walks; he is trying not to think about the blister forming on his right heel. He should have worn yesterday’s socks; they would have been better than nothing.

When he reaches the cirque at the end of the valley, he scrambles down to the bottom and pulls off his shoe; one heel is soaked with blood. He lowers his foot into a tea-colored pool, the top layer warmed by the sun, and lies back on the rock, keeping his foot in the water, making a comfortable bed on the moss with his jacket. The house, the cottages, the moving men, even Owen Mór, disappear from view; he is completely encased in mountain. He remembers hiding up here late one summer, on a morning when he was due to return to boarding school, when the thought of the place made him sick. It had taken them hours to find him: his mother and father and Francis’s predecessor, a man named Thom O’Connor, all traipsing around the gardens and up into the hills, before finally tracking him down here, at the lip of the tarn, cold, but not much wet, and happy. He knew that by the time they got him ready to go, he’d miss at least the first day, which he did. As did his brother, who, always more intrepid than John, didn’t hide his scorn that his younger sibling resorted to such tricks. The similarity between that day and this isn’t lost on him now.

Hours later he walks on towards home, trying to calculate the movers’ progress. They might have left the house and gone down to the cottage—or they might have finished altogether. He can’t see Marianne and the children like this, disheveled and a little bloody. When he opens the gate to the gardens, the moving men have indeed disappeared. Crunching across the gravel, he tries to open Dulough’s front door. It’s locked. It takes him a few moments to absorb that he must go around to the back.

The kitchen looks as it always has, saucepans hanging from hooks above the range, the row of porcelain hot water bottles on a shelf by the door, the battery of servants’ bells labeled “Drawing Room,” “Dining Room,” “Bedroom One,” “Bedroom Two,” all the way up to “Ten.” Grateful that the kitchen hasn’t changed, he moves through the passage into the house proper. The hall has always been a bare room, if one can call a hall a room, but now it is utterly empty. Even the tapestry of the hunt has been taken, leaving a long, dark stain on the wall. The drawing room and dining room are empty too, but for their gold mirrors, still hanging over the fireplaces, too big to go anywhere but there. They reflect the rooms back twice their size and so, like the hall, they seem much bigger than before. Now that the furniture is gone, he can see the colors the wallpaper used to be, a deep burgundy in the dining room, and in the drawing room, a silvery moss green.

He has almost grown used to the empty spaces but when he finally goes upstairs, his own bedroom shocks him. Where he left his sleeping wife that morning, there is a spool of twine on the carpet. In that strange duality that can exist in the mind, the one that allows us to make two appointments at three o’clock on the same day, John, knowing that the furniture would be gone, has come up here to get a clean shirt and a pair of socks from his wardrobe. He looks out the bay window, glad that the view is the same as always when what is behind him has changed so completely. Because the bed was the last place he saw Marianne, he half believes that she has disappeared and he feels the need to find her, to see if she is all right.

He goes into the bathroom adjoining their bedroom; if he is honest, he looks better than expected. The walk has done him good. His cheeks are pink, like his daughter’s, and he looks somewhat rested. But that doesn’t solve the problem of not having a shirt; without it, he looks strange, not himself at all. When he puts his nose in his jumper to see whether it smells very bad, he realizes that a V-shape has been tattooed into his chest by the sun and the wind. He splashes water on his face and puts some in his hair, running his fingers through it as best he can; there is no comb and no towel. Really, he needs a bath. The bottom of his right trouser leg still has some blood on it, but he hopes not noticeably so. Fortunately, downstairs, no one has thought to remove the old coats that hang above a line of boots by the back door. He rummages in the coats and comes up with a scarf, which he ties neatly around his neck as he makes his way down the avenue to his new home.

In the cottage, he finds Marianne in Philip’s room, pulling the wet bedclothes off his bed.

“Darling.” Marianne brushes her hair out of her eyes. “Where have you
been?
”

He quiets her by putting his hands over her ears and kissing her on the forehead, relieved to have found her.

“In town. What can I do to help?”

Philip

The
morning after the move, Philip and Kate escaped the new cottage to go swimming. Built years ago in Dulough’s ramparts, the pool was separated from the lake by a low, lichen-encrusted wall, so that from far away it was impossible to tell where the pool stopped and the lake began.

In the cottage, they had slipped their swimming togs on under their clothes. They knew that there was nothing for it but to throw them off and dive in without thinking. To pause was to be beaten by the icy water, and neither was going to give up in front of the other. Each year, when the weather got warmer, in May or June, Francis would drain the pool of its winter casualties. There were the usual leaves, rotted, disintegrated, but there were other things too, things which had sunk to the bottom—birds, mice, even badgers. When the water froze, Philip and Kate could see the carcasses suspended there, halfway between the surface and the bottom of the pool. When it unfroze, Francis scooped them out with a net, their animal skin falling away from their bones. This ritual had not yet been performed; the children would have to try not to think about what was below them.

Philip was first in. Kate hesitated for a moment, watching as the debris closed over the hole he made in the water. A few seconds went by. She ran at the pool and jumped high into the air, careful to miss where his body might be. When she came up, there he was, laughing, spluttering. “Ha, ha,” he said gleefully. She pushed his head under, only now registering the cold shock of the water that had not so long ago been ice.

After Francis fished out the pool’s winter catch, he would drain it and give the blue bottom a good scrubbing. The children would help him throw the buckets of hot, soapy water, which he spread around with a coarse-bristled sweeping brush. The paint was chipped now, and the blue was marred by clouds of white. Francis said that it could do with being repainted, but there wasn’t the money, and there were more important things to be fixed. As they swam in circles, Philip stopped and asked Kate whether it would be painted now that the tourists were coming.

“Prob-ly not,” she said. “I don’t think people from warm places would want to swim in a cold Irish pool.”

When Francis had finished, it was refilled with clean water, but it was mostly rain they were swimming in now. He would kill them if he knew. But the gasping, freezing shock of jumping in had done them both good. It erased, if only for a few moments, the dullness that had settled on them since yesterday.

They were grateful that there was enough hot water when they got back to the cottage for them to have baths. When they sat back down at the kitchen table, their skin still tingled. Kate put the tea on; as they drank, they made shapes from the damp that had risen up to stain the bare concrete floor. Philip saw a tree and a car, Kate traced the outline of a jagged mountain with her finger. The walls were bare, too. According to their mother, most of Dulough’s pictures were far too big to fit into such a cramped little house. But the furniture had slid magically into the places Philip had thought it would go. The mahogany wardrobe towered over his parents’ room and seemed to lean in slightly, as if, were the earth to tremor, it would fall flat on the bed. The bed itself had been pushed into a space under the window; the iron headboard with its gold swirls reached nearly all the way to the ceiling. There was room for only one bedside table, and Philip wondered which of his parents would get it. It reminded him of the dwellings from
The Wind in the Willows,
the tiny rooms eked out of the riverbank or the trunk of a tree, with furniture cluttered about, far too much of it, so that Mole and Ratty could barely move.

When they had finished their tea, they began their work. At Philip’s insistence, their father had set them some geography at nine. It was nearly eleven now and they’d have to hurry to get it done before lunch. Kate began drawing in a listless, halfhearted way. Philip got up and went to the window.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Looking at the valley.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to draw it.”

Kate sighed in exasperation. She was annoyed that Philip had reminded their father to set them schoolwork.

“There’s one in
this
book, that you can
trace;
 it’ll be a lot easier.”

“But I want to draw
our
valley, not that one.”

“We don’t have time—here.”

She thrust their textbook in his direction and pointed at the perfectly symmetrical glaciated valley. He took the book from her, glanced at the picture, and then let his eyes wander back to his favorite passage:

During the last ice age, glaciers covered much of Ireland. When they finally melted, a new country had been fashioned out of the old landscape. Snow collected on the mountains and turned to ice, which pushed down into the rock in a circular motion, forming what geographers call a
corrie
or
cirque
(from the French word for circus, because the geographical feature they formed resembled an upside-down big top). Soon the ice would find a weakness in the side of the cirque and spill over the lip. It made its way down the mountainside, gathering momentum, pulling branches, rocks, soil and other debris with it (the correct term is
moraine
) until it became a great river of ice, gouging its way to the sea. The glacier followed the path of the river that went before it, obliterating the old terrain and forming a
U-shaped valley,
which, over the years, would fill with water and become a deep lake with steep sides.…

Philip had read and reread this section. He was fascinated to think that thousands of years ago Dulough looked quite different than it did now, that there had been no lake but a river, winding its way down to the sea. And ice so deep that it swallowed up everything in its path. If the house and cottages had been around then, it would have swept them away, too. Before reading about glaciation, he had never considered that his world had not always been just as he saw it, and he felt suddenly more grown-up to be armed with this information.

Kate had nearly finished drawing the textbook U-shaped valley into her notebook. Theirs was not nearly so neat and tidy. Philip got up again and looked out the window above the sink. The valley in the book was a theoretical one, and in that, it was perfect, with evenly spaced cirques and hanging valleys, as well as symmetrical-looking scree. He was determined to draw Dulough just as it was now, but he would leave out anything he wasn’t sure how to label.