Black Lake Page 7

  The ruins of those cottages and the ridges where the families had grown potatoes—without much luck—were visible in the foothills of the valley. There was one family left in town, the O’Callaghans, whose ancestors had been evicted. John’s father had begun to lease them a couple of Dulough’s better fields at far below market value when he took over the estate. John had stopped charging them rent altogether when his turn came. When his accountant asked about it, he couldn’t bring himself to tell the truth, claiming that the land went unused. When he saw the O’Callaghans in town he avoided them, as he imagined they did him. Murphy would find out about the arrangement soon enough and put a stop to it, no doubt.

  Once Campbell had rid himself of his tenants, he began work on the house in earnest. He chose a naturally flat promontory on the lake, with excellent views of the valley and, in the distance, the sea. To his cousin, Campbell gave obsessive instructions: The house must be grand enough to impress any friends he and Olivia might invite to stay with them, but not so grand as to offend his Presbyterian sensibility. This delicate balance consumed Campbell and Wrenn-Harris as they drew and redrew the plans. Finally a house that was elegantly in keeping with the stark beauty of the valley, but devoid of any luxuries, was born. Visitors may be interested to note that all the bathrooms are without mirrors and instead have windows above the basins, so that the bather may worship God’s beauty rather than their own.

  And yet, though my ancestor planned meticulously, he was seized by a stab of conscience during the building of the house. Much to his cousin’s dismay, he halted construction before Dulough was complete; the ballroom on the third floor went unfinished. His cousin felt that Campbell’s decision was a mutilation of his design, and the two were never to speak again.

  The house was not the sole building erected by Campbell. In tandem, the chapel on the island was built. Thousands of years ago, a part of the demesne collapsed into the sea, leaving an island that is now less than a mile square. Campbell very much liked the idea that it would take physical hardship for his family to worship, that they would have to walk out over the sand to the island or, when the tide was in, take a boat. The chapel was spared no expense; though there were never more than a few congregants, it was equipped for up to a hundred. The design, both inside and out, is quite traditionally Gothic, but simplified for Philip’s tastes. He and Olivia are buried there, as is every family member since. We regret that the island will not be open to visitors.

  When he was satisfied with the house, Campbell set about designing the gardens. Here he could do as he liked, as he could be sure that the more exotic his planting was, the more pleased his God would be. (Please see my wife’s guide for a more detailed description of the grounds.)

  In 1863, when the gardens were still in their infancy, Philip Campbell took ill. Though his illness went undiagnosed at the time, his symptoms suggest a cancer of the respiratory system. He died quickly, and by autumn Olivia Campbell was mistress of Dulough.

  Olivia was a thoroughly different character to her late husband and set about modifying the estate to her own tastes. I have no doubt that, had she been able to find them, she would have restored the evicted families to their homes. At forty, she was still a comparatively young woman and, rather surprisingly, she was not intimidated by the estate’s isolation. After selling off much of her husband’s land in Scotland, she made Dulough her home. Photographs from the years after his death show elaborate picnics in the gardens and parties in the swimming bath by the lake. She became a patroness of the arts, using her wealth to establish scholarships in the local secondary school, as well as inviting both British and Irish artists to stay and work at Dulough.

  But Olivia enjoyed the friendship of one artist in particular, Geoffrey Roe, who bought the guesthouse at Lough Power, where the Campbells had stayed all those years before. His great-grandson, the well-known sculptor Edward Steele, lives at Lough Power today.

  Though Olivia is keen to point out in her diaries that she never attended Roe’s parties, she did come to know him well. He was a great contrast to her first husband: Where Philip was religious, Roe was a known atheist, widely reported to have left London after a string of soured affairs. Where Philip took pride in denying the self, Roe was famous for doing just as he pleased. He is very often in her writings, easel set towards the sea, troubling some servant or other for a jar of water for his brushes, or a rag, or a gin and tonic.

  Once, in a London gallery, John had seen a painting by Geoffrey Roe tucked into an exhibition entitled Water Women. There, between two of Bonnard’s paintings of Marthe in the bath, was a picture called C. Bathes. It was significantly less accomplished than Bonnard’s, and Roe would never have been shown alongside such a master had his subject matter not fit the theme of the exhibition. The perspective of C. Bathes was from the woman’s head; the face itself wasn’t visible, the body almost submerged. It was modest compared to the paintings surrounding it. The date and location were listed as unknown, but John recognized the bathroom as Dulough’s, and knew instantly that the “C” stood for Olivia Campbell.

  The Campbells had just one child, Duncan, a solicitor in Edinburgh. Olivia bought an apartment in the New Town and visited him regularly, but after one such visit, she wrote in her diary that she was ‘always happy to return to Dulough’ (3 June 1878) and that she feared that, after her death, her son would ‘neglect the house and gardens, leaving them in the hands of some caretaker or other, never bothering to visit himself’(5 November 1880). She eventually chose to leave the estate to my great-grandfather Thomas Harvey, her sister’s child, adding the stipulation that their first son must be christened Philip and that the owner of the house must always be named Campbell.

  Olivia died in 1910. Unlike her husband, she was much mourned by the local community. Thomas Harvey arrived the following year from England with his wife, Sarah, to take over the running of Dulough. They brought my grandmother Caroline with them. She was ten. Though Olivia indicated that her diaries were to be burnt, the Harveys found them a great handbook to the workings of the estate; there were notes on the house’s quirks, how to treat particular blights in the gardens, how to go about pruning a rhododendron, which butcher to trust—and which of the regular guests had outstayed their welcome.

  My grandmother Caroline was twenty-two when the Civil War exploded in Ireland. The IRA were roaming the country, torching the big houses of the Anglo-Irish. Dulough was an obvious target because of my ancestor’s cruelty to the tenant farmers so soon after the Famine. At that time, Caroline wrote:

  ‘I woke suddenly this morning. It was still dark & I had a feeling that something was different—or not quite right. I put my dressing-gown on & went out into the hall. It was silent; I couldn’t hear the wind anymore. There was a creak on the stairs & before I had time to be afraid, I saw Daddy disappearing into his study. I knocked on the open door. His gun rested against the desk, the barrel pointing up to the ceiling. It was the first time I’d seen it out of the locked cabinet in the hall. “Caroline, you understand what’s happening, that Ireland is in great trouble at the moment?” I told him that I understood it very well & that the English should get out and leave us to our own devices. My father smiled and said, “Unfortunately our position is not quite that simple, although I agree that Ireland should be left to its own devices, as you put it.” I waited for him to elaborate, but instead, he turned and looked out the window.’

  In this extract, we can see that my great-grandfather felt the threat to Dulough was very real indeed. And yet the Irish Republican Army didn’t burn the house as they had burnt so many others (perhaps we were simply too far north). But, a few months later, a group of local men, claiming to be the local faction of the IRA, marched down the avenue and up to the front door. They knocked politely and informed the housekeeper that they would be taking over Dulough ‘as long as it served the needs of the Irish people.’ The housekeeper informed them that they would not, and that she recognised more than a few of them. This tac
tic was successful in diminishing the invasion but not in stopping it completely, and a small group of young men who would have been much more at home in the fields than fighting for the needs of the Irish people used the dining room as a Center of Operations for a few months in the winter of 1922/3. The occupation ended when the family became tired of eating in the kitchen, and when my grandmother formed a strong friendship with a quiet local boy, my great-grandfather informed them that Dulough had more than played its part in the fight for independence.

  For a time, Dulough was silent again after the IRA occupation. My grandmother missed the boyish IRA contingent terribly. So she was thrilled when she won a scholarship to Trinity College in Dublin to read Physics, a very unusual subject for women to study then. Upon graduation, she married my grandfather George Monk, of Enniskerry, Co. Wicklow, the son of close family friends. The price he paid for the estate was his name. He promptly became ‘George Campbell’, at least on paper.

  My father, Philip the Second, was born in 1933 and was to be their only child. He married my mother, Katherine, in 1956, and my brother, the third Philip, was born in June of 1958. I came along two years later. I have happy memories of my childhood. Until we went to boarding school, we had lessons in the mornings, taught by both my father and my mother in the upstairs drawing room. When we had finished our school-work, we had a lot to occupy us; I remember building a tree house in one of the oaks by the avenue, the remains of which are still visible today.

  My brother went to Trinity to study law when I was fifteen, making it clear that I would have the responsibility of taking over Dulough when the time came.

  Surely that was enough. He massaged the web of skin between his right thumb and forefinger. There they were, fiction and truth, so tightly bound that minutes after writing them, he could almost forget which was which. It had come more easily than he had expected. Turning to the first page, he wrote Dulough: The History of a House in Donegal. He scratched it out: Dulough: The History of a Donegal House. No. Dulough: A History. He knew now that the house would never be lived in again, that he’d put something in motion that couldn’t be reversed. Perhaps they all thought it was a good thing—the Campbells were blow-ins who’d turfed five families out of their homes; it was only right that locals should be able to lounge around his house now, having tea and scones on the patio.

  He thought about Kate and Philip, how his son had to carry on that name, a word whose short “L” suggested him perfectly, a little slip of a thing, but also that first Philip and his cruelty. What sort of future had he made for them; what damage had he done them? And his wife. Having watched her crying up there in her garden when she thought no one was looking, he knew she wasn’t happy. The exhilaration he’d been getting from writing about the estate vanished. He wanted to have it finished now.

  I followed my brother to Dublin three years later, but geography was my subject. I met my wife, Marianne, there. Upon graduating, we married in the chapel on the island. We have two children, Katherine and Philip.

  We very much hope that you enjoy your visit and that you will return.

  As he was contemplating whether he should sign his name at the end, Marianne appeared at the door. He wondered how long she’d been there, with that disapproving look on her face, watching him labor over the house’s history. He knew she found it unfair that he got to keep his study when Philip was so upset at having lost his room. “Can’t talk now,” he said, fixing his gaze firmly back on his work, determined not to look up again until she was gone. He sensed her weight shift and her body turning away. Why couldn’t she understand that he needed to keep his study—and that Philip had a perfectly good bedroom in the cottage?

  When he was quite sure she was gone, that she was too far away to hear anything, he went over to the fireplace and picked up a vase with an elaborate pattern on it. He knew it was valuable. Lifting it over the hearth, as high as his chest, he let it go. It crashed onto the tiles, cracking one neatly down the middle, and broke into smithereens. It was so quiet in the house that the breaking sound hung in the air. He stayed still until it stopped.

  But he found, as he lay in bed that night, that he didn’t have it in him to cope with a battle on two fronts. The following morning, in the moments after they woke, when he hoped her guard was down, he said, “Let’s go to Dublin for the weekend. Mrs. Connolly can look after the children.”

  She surprised him. “Yes,” she said simply, as she pulled on her dressing gown. She must have thought that they needed it very badly if she was agreeing to leave Kate and Philip behind, so he suggested that they didn’t stay with her parents, that they stay in a proper hotel, in town, and go for nice meals. He would phone the Shelbourne.

  They stopped in Enniskillen for a pub lunch of toasted sandwiches and half-pints of lager. As they passed through the border, they talked of an event that had now long passed into family lore, the time that John’s father had driven through a checkpoint within an hour of a bomb, how he’d been watching the news that night and there it was, the tower blown sky-high, the pieces strewn about the field, amongst the cows. The soldiers he’d offered sweets to probably dead. Or maybe not. He’d chosen to believe that the one he’d chatted with as they’d checked over his car, as they’d opened the boot and rifled through its contents, who, by the sound of him, was from Cornwall, or Devon or one of those lovely southern English counties, hadn’t been killed.

  John calculated how much their lunch would cost with the exchange rate, the Irish pound weak against the British. But perhaps this would help them when they opened the gates to the visitors, perhaps it would bring the Northerners to Donegal. He was counting on the Americans, though. They were more susceptible to the myth.

  The way into Dublin looked quite different, with its vast new spiderweb of roads.

  “Do you think that you could have a look at the map, perhaps? Find out where we went wrong?” John asked Marianne.

  “Oh yes, sorry—course.” She unclicked her seat belt and climbed into the backseat to rummage about. Most people her age would have twisted around, felt for the map with one hand, but Marianne threw herself into things—scrambled up mountains, ran down to the sea. It was one of her most endearing qualities, John thought, and it was one of the many that made her a much better parent than he was.

  When they arrived at the hotel, Marianne’s excitement at the journey had abated and she seemed angry again. Dropping their bags, he looked out the window. “We have a wonderful view of the green.”

  She disappeared into the bathroom; he heard the water running. Closing their bedroom door as quietly as he could, he went down to the lobby to phone Mrs. Connolly. She sounded harried. He knew that she felt that they’d asked too much of her, that she had enough to do in the run-up to the opening. But the children would be no bother at all.

  In the hotel bar, he ordered a drink. It was best to leave Marianne to her own devices; she would come to find him when she was ready. He looked out the window. The people were rich, there was no other word for it, with their expensive clothes and hands full of shopping. He saw Brown Thomas bags often. Even the bags themselves looked as if they’d cost a fortune to produce. They might assume that he was rich, too, sitting there in the bar of the Shelbourne, but the price of the hotel was out of their league. He’d have to put the bill on his credit card, reasoning with himself that he’d be getting a proper salary soon; he would pay it off.

  Marianne came in wearing a long velvet skirt and a cardigan with Christmassy baubles hanging from it. John had never really enjoyed Marianne’s dress sense, and yet the individuality of it was one of the things that had drawn him to her at college. Her hair was newly washed and she wore makeup; there was a sheen to her lips. She looked fresh, as if she had scrubbed off Donegal in the bath and was ready to become part of the city again.

  “So, shall we go?” She landed, smiling, in the chair opposite. “Two drinks in one day, not like you.” She took a sip of his Scotch. “Horrible stuff.”

  S
he was not usually this way. He found her shifting moods disconcerting. It was a symptom of the move, of upheaval, of the fact that he’d let her down. He should take advantage of her good humor now. Standing up, he offered her his arm.

  They crossed the road so that they could walk along by Stephen’s Green. Marianne reached up and touched various leaves, holding them between her fingers contemplatively and then letting them go so that they snapped back into place. She didn’t say whether she approved of the gardeners’ work or not.

  John wanted to walk straight down Dawson Street to Trinity. He was not necessarily sentimental about his college days, but he always liked to visit when he was in town. Marianne never seemed interested in going back, though; she couldn’t have been more eager to graduate, to move on to the next act of her life. She enjoyed being a mother much more than she’d ever liked being a student.

  It was a busy Saturday and most people, with the exception of the groups of teenagers hanging limply around street corners, seemed to be in a great hurry. Some of them bumped into John without noticing; they would have apologized ten, or even five, years ago. It was all this new money, he thought—we’re a different country now. But he knew that he was in no position to moralize; he had handed Dulough over to the government in order to make money.