Black Lake Read online

  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.

  Until the moment his mother had told him that she was going to will Dulough to him, John had never doubted that he did want to live there. But when he closed the door to the drawing room and went upstairs to think about it, it hit him for the first time that he might not want the estate after all. He had yet to meet Marianne—in fact he had never had a successful relationship. Girls at Trinity showed interest in him, but they always fell away after an evening in the pub or a drawn-out coffee. He had a growing sense of unease that there was something wrong with him, but he hadn’t been able to work out quite what it was. His clothes seemed the most likely possibility and so he’d bought himself a new wardrobe and then discarded it when a girl in one of his lectures told him that she liked him better the other way. He hadn’t, then, wondered what deeper deficiencies he had that might stop people from falling in love with him, deficiencies Marianne had made him well aware of since.

  The night his mother told him he would inherit Dulough, he worried that he wouldn’t find someone who wanted to live here with him. He considered going back downstairs to tell her he’d changed his mind, but then who would take care of the place? A cousin somewhere? Or, worse, would it be sold? The thought of either had made him feel so sick that he had decided that, whether he found someone who wanted to be here with him or not, he would come back after college and do his best by the estate. Then he’d met Marianne.

  “Try not to look so happy. It’s embarrassing,” she said teasingly when she accepted his marriage proposal.

  It was true that he hadn’t been able to believe his luck; not only had she agreed to marry him, she had agreed to live at Dulough. As they drove back to Donegal after the proposal, he thought he’d better start educating her about the area, so he told her that in Irish the Poison Glen was really the Heavenly Glen, but when the English were mapping the country and appropriating Irish names to suit their own tongues, they made a mistake, there being only two letters’ difference between “heaven” and “poison” in Irish. But he had yet to tell her of what Philip the First had done, that he’d thrown his tenants off the land right after the Famine, without a care as to what happened to them.

  They drove through the gates and up the avenue, the lake on their right, the valley closing in to the sea on both sides. He parked the car in front of the house. Mrs. Connolly came out to meet them as she had the first time he’d brought Marianne. She embraced his fiancée warmly. John was relieved; he hadn’t been sure how Mrs. Connolly would take to the future Mrs. Campbell; she had been devoted to the last one.

  Francis helped take their bags upstairs. John could see him stealing glances at Marianne, sizing her up. She was beautiful, after all, there was no way around that, but John knew that Francis was looking for something beyond beauty in a woman who would live at Dulough. Mrs. Connolly led the way to his parents’ old bedroom, instead of that of his childhood, confirming him only then as the true owner of the estate in her eyes.

  After Francis and Mary retreated, Marianne disappeared into the little bathroom adjoining their bedroom, a luxury his mother had added in her later years. When she emerged, though she hadn’t changed clothes, her countenance told him that she had made the decision to cast off her student self, that she was ready to become mistress of Dulough. He put his arm through hers as they went down to dinner.

  There had been no mishaps at Philip’s funeral as there had been at John’s mother’s. Marianne put her
self in charge of everything. They were fortunate. The Atlantic dragged itself further out than he’d ever seen it, giving them more than enough time to make their way across the sand and to hold a half-hour-long service of sorts; none of the Campbells had been religious since Philip the First. Kate read part of The Wind in the Willows beautifully, clearly, as her feet sank into the mound of earth next to the grave, which John had chosen to be as close as possible to Philip’s hut.

  Though Marianne had been the first to suspect that Philip was making secret trips to the island, John had been the one to discover what Philip had been building. On the day after Philip drowned, Mr. Flanagan, the funeral director in town, asked whether they should send some men to dig the grave. John said that there was no need, that Francis would do it. Then he’d caught himself in his cruelty.

  “We’ll send a few men tomorrow,” said Mr. Flanagan. “You’ll just need to let them know where.”

  So John was forced to go out to the island to decide where Philip should be buried. He wandered amongst the stones of his ancestors, thinking that perhaps it was time to break this Campbell tradition; he couldn’t bear the thought of his son out here alone. As he scanned the island, a little structure at the far end of the graveyard had caught his eye. When he got closer, he could see that it was a hut and that it had been built out of the drystone walls. The roof was made of planks of wood that stuck out the front to make a little porch. Francis had asked John if the men from the government had been given permission to take wood from the barn; he’d noticed bits and pieces going missing. John had said he’d talk to Mr. Murphy about it, but he’d known that he couldn’t do anything, that the government men could take whatever they wanted. John should have realized where the wood had gone.

  As he neared the hut, he heard the crash of waves at the end of the island and the sea wind loud in his ears. He fixed his eyes on the opening, half believing that Philip might crawl out, grinning at the trick he’d played on all of them. But John himself had taken Philip’s wet body out of Francis’s arms the previous evening and laid him on the new couch in the drawing room, as Marianne watched, ashen. John had tried to remember what he’d learnt in school, tilting Philip’s head back, opening the mouth, checking to see if there was anything obstructing the airway—seaweed, perhaps—but there wasn’t. He breathed into his son’s lungs, watching the little chest rise with his own breath, so like real breath. Then, two firm hands on his shoulders, moving him out of the way: a German doctor on holiday in Donegal. John stood back, next to Marianne, looking on, as the doctor pressed on Philip’s body much more roughly than seemed right. John took a step forwards to stop him, but Francis gripped his arm firmly. The doctor turned to them, the palms of his hands turned upwards in a gesture of helplessness or apology, and Marianne said: “Kate.” Mrs. Connolly turned and went out at that moment, as if the word were a command directed at her.

  John had got down on his hands and knees and crawled inside the hut; it was dark, the walls had been well made, the holes between the big stones filled with little ones and filled again with mud. It was warm too, completely sheltered from the wind. In the corner was an old biscuit tin. He opened it. Inside was one of John’s books from when he was a child, Five Get into a Fix. Under it was a bar of chocolate, half gone, and the small torch Philip had been given in his stocking the previous Christmas. John switched it on and shone it up at the ceiling, where a long-legged spider went about its business. Pulling his knees up to his chest, he rested his head between them. When he left the hut hours later, he went to the nearest point in the graveyard and made an outline in stones so that the men would know exactly where to dig.

  John had meant to give the tin with the book and the chocolate and the torch to Mr. Flanagan to be put in Philip’s coffin, but he’d changed his mind at the last minute and kept it for himself. He wouldn’t show it to Marianne; the presence of the Famous Five book seemed to make him somehow more culpable, which was stupid, he thought later, because he couldn’t have been any more culpable. Marianne had pointed this fact out in the letter she’d left for him when she retreated to the ballroom with Kate.

  John,

  Before I met you, I would have said that families with a history like yours deserved to lose everything, and so I was surprised when I fell in love with you. I was even more surprised when I fell in love with Dulough. I can see now that that’s why you didn’t tell me we were in trouble; you couldn’t bear to disappoint me. But there shouldn’t be secrets between husbands and wives.

  I found Olivia’s diaries while you were in Dublin leaving Kate at that school. I read all of them, from beginning to end. I probably know them better than you do now. Then I did a little research of my own, at the new Internet café in town. First I just wanted to understand more about Geoffrey Roe and Olivia. There was nothing there about them, although I did find out he wasn’t as wild as she—or Philip the First—imagined. It was another painter who started the rumour that he had been littering the British Empire with his offspring. In fact, there’s no mention of him ever having gone to Africa, or doing much travelling at all really. It’s entirely possible that Donegal was the most exotic place he’d ever been. He wouldn’t be the first man to make himself sound more interesting than he actually was.

  I couldn’t tear myself away from the computer, so I paid for another hour; I wanted to know more about that ancestor of yours, the man who gave our son his name. It’s all there: the evictions, what happened to the families afterwards (the poorhouse or the boat to Australia, if you’re interested), the scholarships Olivia set up at the local school, which even she knew did nothing to make amends for what her husband had done, her obituary. There was of course no mention anywhere of Dulough during the Civil War. Nothing. When I got home, I found Francis in the gardens. The poor thing looked so nervous when I approached him, and I’ll tell you that I was fairly nervous myself; it’s no easy thing to remind people around here of your family’s history. He must have thought I was going to talk about the day he found Philip. When he realised that wasn’t what I was after, he relaxed. I asked whether it was true what you wrote about the IRA occupying Dulough. He told me it wasn’t. Do you realise that you’ve lost the Connollys with that? Did you think what he and Mary would make of you? You didn’t, did you? I’m sure Murphy loved that stuff, though. Well done, it’ll certainly bring more money in.…

  There was more, but John didn’t like to think about the rest. It listed the various ways he’d disappointed her since they got married, how he’d let her down, how he’d let his family down. Other than the fact that Marianne had done research into Dulough’s history, what she said in her letter didn’t come as much of a surprise. It was simply a gathering together of many things she’d already intimated. It was funny how those small intimations held so much less weight separately than they did when they were all strung together as they were in her letter, lined up like soldiers in a firing squad. Even the fact that she’d found out he’d lied in the brochure wasn’t much of a surprise; it was only how she found out. She had been more intrepid than he expected. He had thought it more likely that Phil would mention sometime that so much of the brochure was made up—not so much as a revelation, but as an acknowledgment that for once in his life John had shown some business acumen.

  But it was the last line of the letter that had troubled John most at the time: You don’t need to worry about us. We’ll be perfectly comfortable. You have your study. Kate and I need somewhere, too.

  He couldn’t think what she was talking about. As far as he knew, Kate was in school and Marianne had spent the day in her garden. When had he seen her last? That morning? No. She had taken to sleeping in Kate’s bed, leaving him alone in their new room; she had been up long before him. He hadn’t said anything about this sleeping arrangement; it was the way he found things when he got back from dropping Kate at school. He thought that when she got used to Kate being away, she would come back.

  He went to the cottage. The lights were off, but he
r car was there. Perhaps she’d left him a message on the kitchen table as she often did, but before he got to the kitchen, he noticed the answering machine blinking; it was the principal of Kate’s school, a supercilious man named Robert Goodman.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Campbell, I’m phoning to inform you that it is against school policy for parents to remove children from class unless it’s an emergency situation. I very much hope this wasn’t the case today. I await your phone call.”

  John’s first thought was that the principal had it wrong; how could Marianne have gone to Dublin without him realizing? He circled the cottage, throwing open doors, turning on lights; there was no one there, but something in Kate’s room caught his eye. Her wardrobe was open and inside he could see her two school uniforms hanging there. Underneath, her new school shoes were lined up next to the pile of bags from the shopping trip she and Marianne had taken in August. He went next door. Francis and Mary were eating dinner.

  “Terribly sorry to bother you…I don’t suppose you’ve seen Marianne?”

  Mrs. Connolly rose from the table. “Are they not in there?” She inclined her head in the direction of his cottage. Then, reading his expression, she said, “Did you not know Kate was coming home?”

  Francis, who’d been watching silently, set his knife and fork down beside his plate and began pulling on his coat.

  When John and Francis got to the house, it was as dark as John had left it half an hour earlier. He couldn’t see how his wife and daughter could be inside, but Francis began turning on the lights in every room. The drawing room looked the same as it had for the past few months, the blue ropes hanging on brass poles. The only difference between this room and the one conceived of by Murphy was that the couch had been replaced after Francis had brought Philip in from the sea, kicking the ropes out of the way, laying the wet child gently down. John wondered briefly whether Francis noticed that the couch had been changed.