Black Lake Page 4

  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 circula
r 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.

  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.