Black Lake (6 page)

Kate said, “If you don’t hurry up and get that done, they’re going to know we weren’t here all morning.”

Their mother was the first to return home. She burst through the back door with such force that the door hit the wall behind and shuddered. She made sure that the glass hadn’t broken and turned to encounter her children sitting at the kitchen table, looking up at her in surprise. She was not usually one for door banging, and Philip wondered whether she had almost forgotten that she had two children, doing their lessons in the new kitchen, in the little house with the damp walls. Now she stood by the sink, watching them and swaying slightly.

“Look at my drawing.” He held it up for her. “It’s Dulough.”

Kate looked at him as if he were an idiot. She took her mother’s hand loosely.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

Philip’s picture was forgotten. He shouldn’t have shown it to her until it was completely finished. He wanted her to say that it was very good.

“The gardeners took a huge chunk out of the lawn to widen the path. Apparently there wouldn’t have been enough room for the visitors to walk otherwise.”

There was a new accent on the way his mother said “visitors.” Before, she had tried to make it sound smooth, almost welcoming, but the word had hard edges now. This inflection bothered Philip more than her distress. Leaving his mum and Kate in the kitchen, he slipped quietly out the front door. When he got to the big house, a different van to that of the movers was parked outside; it was dark green and said
T
.
BOYLE
&
SONS
,
LANDSCAPERS
on each side. The last word had vines curling around it, as if they’d sprouted from the letters. There was a white car, too:
OFFICE
OF
PUBLIC
WORKS
,
it said. They were the people in charge of Dulough now. They were the government, or part of the government, Philip wasn’t sure, but his father insisted that the family should be proud that Dulough was being made accessible to the Irish people. There was no one in either of the cars, but the front door of the house stood open, as if someone had just been through.

Philip crouched behind a rhododendron, not far from the top of the cliffs, where two rows of trees marked the end of the demesne and the beginning of the sea. There was a steep drop of at least fifty feet behind him; there the garden ended and the beach began. He looked out over the lawn; one side had been churned up from green grass to black earth. A piece of orange twine ran the length of it, marking where the new path would be. It was three or four times as wide as the old one. At the end nearest him, two men were digging up the last part of it. They hadn’t noticed Philip and worked in silence, stopping only to slide packets of cigarettes out of their pockets. They smoked three each in half an hour, holding them between their yellowed thumbs and forefingers and sucking on them like straws as their boots sank into the mud.

When the men had finished, they moved off in the direction of the higher gardens. Philip came out of his hiding place. They had turned up roots, worms, rocks, and a stream that ran under the old path towards the sea. Their work had disturbed its course and the water had begun to pool, swirling with earth, in the newly turned ground. Philip knew that if it wasn’t fixed, the whole lawn would be a pond by morning. That would upset his mother even more.

First he picked out the bigger rocks; he would use them to make a channel for the water. He laid them carefully on the old path so that they wouldn’t sink back into the mud. Before he began his work, he picked up one of the longer cigarette ends and stuck it in his mouth; it was wet, but he moved it to the corner of his lips, like the men had, and it warmed up. When he had fixed the stream, he watched as it flowed, trickling over humps in the earth and brimming with butts and earthworms, away to the head of the cliffs.

He was very dirty. The water had seeped over the tops of his boots, he had patches of mud on his knees, his hands were black. On his way back to the cottage, he noticed that the gardeners’ van had disappeared, leaving tire marks in the gravel, but the white car was still there. He crouched under the drawing room window. Three people sat, two men and a lady, on camp chairs around the unlit fireplace. They each had a teacup and there was a plate of biscuits on the floor in front of them. The lady was writing in a notebook. The younger man was gesturing, cutting the air in half with sweeps of his hands.

Mrs. Connolly came in with a teapot, the one she used for good, and refilled their cups. Philip shrank back into the bushes. Without looking at her, the man put his hand over the top of his cup when she went to fill it. A drop of tea fell from the spout onto his white, freckled skin. He carried on talking as if nothing had happened, and Mrs. Connolly was away out the door, back to the kitchen.

Philip took one more look at the people from the government and went inside the big house. He hoped there weren’t any more of them lurking about the place, that they were all safely penned up in the drawing room. The patterns of his old home had changed. Before, he was able to say to himself, “Mummy is in the drawing room, Daddy is in his study, Kate is in the kitchen with Mrs. Connolly…” They had revolved around each other like planets on preset courses. But now there might be a chance encounter with a stranger as he went up to his room, a stranger who would tell him that he shouldn’t be there.

He ran up the stairs as fast as he could, glad of his stocking feet, and into his bedroom. It was the first time he’d come back since the move and it was exactly how he’d left it, except that it was colder than before. He went over to the window and jumped up onto the ledge, his socks slipping on the slick paint. Muckish and Dooish were there, their summits covered in white cloud that spilled over the top and down the sides, like cream on a Christmas pudding.

Philip got back to the cottage in the late afternoon, when the hills were beginning to get dark. He had missed lunch and it was not yet time for supper. A cold roast beef sandwich sat on the kitchen table with a note beside it from his mother. It seemed relatively cheerful:
Gone for a walk. Back later. Mummy, x x x.
He sat down at the table and lifted up the corners of the brown bread. He did not like roast beef, and he especially did not like cold roast beef, the way it hardened and you had to tear at it with your teeth if you wanted to bite some off. He got up and went to the fridge to see if there was anything else to eat, but there was only milk and butter, and a plate with more cold meat on it.

As he sat back down at the table, his father came in. Taking off his coat, he hung it on the hook behind the back door and smoothed down his hair. His father was always more smartly dressed than his mother. He wore ties every day, even to go on their walks. When they’d gone a particularly long way or climbed a very steep hill, he would stop, undo the top button of his shirt, and loosen the knot of his tie, turning to survey how far they’d come.

“Oh, hello there,” he said. Like Philip’s mother, he too looked surprised to see his son in their new little house.

“I don’t like roast beef sandwiches,” Philip said, “but there isn’t anything else.”

“Really?” His father smiled.

“Yes.” Philip paused for a moment, and then, as a wave of disgust rose in him at the stringy meat, he added, “Mummy was upset today because the men from the government ruined the garden.”

“Where’s Mummy now?” His father’s face twisted, for a moment, into a look Philip hadn’t seen before.

“Gone for a walk.” Philip handed him the note. And before he could show him his drawing of the valley or tell him about damming the stream, his father went back through the door without even bothering to take his coat.

John

As
the children swam in the icy pool, John was on his way to an appointment with the county councillor. When he arrived in town, the bells were tolling for mass. The Catholic church towered over the main street, an ugly building with hulking flying buttresses, too many statues, and an overcrowded graveyard. John liked Father Damien, though, a priest who was not afraid to creep up behind his parishioners in the newsagent’s and ask why they hadn’t been to confession lately. It was because John didn’t come under Father Damien’s jurisdiction that they got on so well.

He parked the car on the bridge over the river that cut the town in two. Malachy’s pub was the closest building to the water and it did well in seafood and Guinness when the tourists came. It must seem terribly authentic to them, John thought, an old whitewashed Donegal farmhouse, with family photographs on the windowsills, watching as you ate. It made him wonder what the tourists would make of Dulough. It would be quite a different experience altogether.

The town was quiet. A few people scurried between the butcher’s, the hardware shop, and the Spar, clutching bags. They paid John no attention and he was glad of this as he walked up the road. Frank Foyle’s office was above Driver’s, a shop that sold goods like walking boots and fishing rods. John rang the bell and waited. He shivered in his shirtsleeves; it was not as warm as it had been the day before. Frank Foyle’s secretary came downstairs; her name was Nancy. She was a buxom, cowlike girl. She’d only left school a year or two ago, but she looked much, much older. Her face was covered in a deep, heavy layer of makeup. Smiling broadly, she said, “How are you, Mr. Campbell?” with the implication that there was no need for an answer.

“Hello there, Nancy.” He’d come to know her quite well over the past year or so, having waited often in the outer office where her desk was while Frank Foyle readied himself for these visits. He felt sorry for Nancy. There were few prospects in the area for girls like her; the ones with any ambition went to Dublin or London. The best John could do was plant the idea in her mind that perhaps Councillor Foyle wasn’t the best choice of employer, that she might be better off somewhere else. Of course, this was a delicate thing to suggest, but he feared that he’d been too subtle. He had often wondered whether she had a boyfriend, a local she might eventually marry, someone who’d build her a nice house and protect her from the Foyles of the world. She would make a good mother, he thought; she was kind, she had sympathy for him and Marianne, he could tell by her manner. He wondered whether there might be a place for her at Dulough now; perhaps she could be trained as a guide or employed in the office overseeing the construction of the Visitors’ Center. He must ask Murphy.

Foyle arrived at his office door, hand outstretched, boots caked in mud and, by the smell of it, dung. “Good to see you, sir,” he said.

A mahogany desk, resembling a coffin, dominated the small room. The county councillor plunged back into his ergonomic chair; there was no such luxury for his guests. What John perched on was hard, wooden, decidedly school-like. Councillor Foyle made John uneasy. He wasn’t sure how much irony was in the “sir.” He knew that Mr. Foyle relished this deal and his own part in it, that he felt things were being righted; Irish land was being returned to the Irish people. Besides, the town needed the jobs that the estate would provide. John had to stifle the urge to remind Foyle that the house still belonged to him, that the government was only looking after the upkeep for the time being. The panic that had caused him to flee the moving men yesterday morning returned.

“That’ll be two cups of tea, Nancy, thanks,” Foyle said, as he got up again to shut the door with his boot.

He looked closely at John in a manner he wouldn’t have had the guts for a year earlier.

“I spoke to your wife yesterday. She said the move was going smoothly.”

So Marianne knew he hadn’t been in town. He should have thought of a better excuse. But he’d no time to dwell on it; a piece of paper was being pushed towards him across the cluttered desk. The thought of visitors arriving in four weeks’ time was suddenly too much.

“Mr. Foyle, I’m still of the same mind about the opening date. The estate won’t be ready in a month.”

What difference would it make if they opened the gates a little later? The weather would be better in June anyway.

Frank Foyle’s mouth puckered. John knew him well enough by now to realize that the politician was annoyed, that he was trying to choose his words carefully.

“We’ve printed the publicity materials with the May opening date already, Mr. Campbell. Paddy Friel’s putting them up this morning. And didn’t you say yourself that the house was in need of a new chimney?”

“It is,” John paused. “That’s precisely what I’m saying, we should wait until the repairs are finished.”

“Ah, but rebuilding the chimney is a big investment that will require a lot of capital. Michael—Mr. Murphy—and me have decided that we need to see how the business does before we invest heavily in the venture.”

John should have known that he couldn’t trust Foyle. He thought miserably about the crumbling chimney, about the rotten window frames, about the missing roof tiles.

“That wasn’t our agreement,” he said weakly.

“We didn’t have an agreement about the chimney, sir. We don’t have agreements about any
specific
improvements. If you’d like to peruse the documents again, you will see that the Office of Public Works hasn’t said what it will and will not repair. We have no particular obligations in that sense. What we do have is an agreement to build the Visitors’ Center, tarmacadam the roadway up to the house, provide you with three minibuses and drivers, staff for the kitchen, a guide for the tours, and a salary for yourself and Mr. Francis Connolly and Mrs. Mary Connolly until yous all reach retirement age. After that, sir, your son—or daughter—remains the owner, of course, but we’ve no salary obligations towards them.”