Black Lake (17 page)

“Well…”

It alarmed me that she was choosing what she said so carefully. I braced myself for criticism.

“I don’t know. It’s hard to put into words.” She hesitated. “You’re older.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“No! No, that’s not what I mean. Not looks-wise. You’re more stately or something.”

“In a bad way?”

She shook her head. “No, it’s nice, sort of dignified. You’ve become more like him.”

“You mean ‘old-fashioned’?”

“A little, I suppose.”

I sighed and leant back on my hands.

She went on. “You’re a bit quiet, to be honest.” She turned away from me and looked out to the island. “Are you all right?”

Was I all right? At that moment, remembering how easily we used to talk, how, even when I was engaged, she and I would go out on the town, I realized how little I’d actually spoken since I’d got married, how the number of words that came out of my mouth had probably been halved or quartered since I’d moved to Donegal.

“I’m fine. It’s just a bit of an adjustment.” I forced myself to laugh. It wasn’t a very convincing one.

“It was a bit of an adjustment for us too. It’s a funny thing when your friend becomes a countess or whatever it is you are.”

“John’s family isn’t titled. You know that; I’m not anything.”

“Ah, I know, I’m just teasing you, but it’s more or less the same thing, isn’t it? I mean, you’ve got servants, for goodness’ sake.”

“One servant,” I corrected her. “And she’s a lot more say in what goes on around here than I do.”

“What’s it like?”

“What’s what like?”

“Living like this.”

“It’s not all it’s cracked up to be, I’ll tell you that much.”

“But it’s gorgeous here.”

I nodded.

“And John seems so into you.”

“I think he is.”

She looked at me quizzically.

“No, no, he is. It’s just that he does his own thing a lot of the time and I’m at a bit of a loose end.”

She looked concerned now. “Why don’t you come down to Dublin once or twice a month for a bit of life? You can stay with me.”

It was a good idea, I wanted to, but I couldn’t tell her that I’d have to ask John for the money. And though it was long before I had any idea we were in trouble, I couldn’t bring myself to ask. It wasn’t that he wouldn’t have given it to me; he’d just never thought that I might need any for myself. I didn’t use money on a daily basis anymore; Mrs. Connolly bought all the food, and when we went into town, John paid for everything. A banknote had barely passed through my hands since we’d got married. It wasn’t embarrassment that stopped me from telling Liesl all this, it was that she’d perceive John as some sort of tyrant, trying to make me into an old-fashioned wife, but that wasn’t it at all. I should have told her the truth, though, because when I didn’t take her up on her offer, I could tell it hurt her, and that it hurt our friendship. She thought I didn’t care about her as much as I had when we were in college, she thought that I
had
got above myself. But hindsight’s a great thing, isn’t it?

The desolation I felt when they, Liesl in particular, left astounded the both of us, and I think it was only getting pregnant with Kate that pulled me out of it completely. It would have been lovely to have a party every year, but when people started having children, it seemed too much to ask them to make the journey. I just hadn’t expected to find the isolation so difficult; nothing about the city prepares you for this.

It was Kate who got me into the gardens. When she was little, John gave us a flower bed and we would dig in it for hours, worms turning around our fingers, the soil dark and wet against the back of our hands. When Kate lost interest, the bed became mine and I surprised myself with its success. This gave me something to talk to Francis about. In the early days, he would watch me, smoking one of his cigarettes, but eventually I got up the courage to ask him a question. Of course, he knew everything about the gardens, where each plant was from, whether it demanded light or shade, how much water it could take. He hated the
Rhododendron ponticum,
which runs wild up here; he was the one with the responsibility of cutting it back. The more time I spent in the gardens, the more I came to disagree with his view of the rhododendron. It isn’t a surprise that Francis and I had a different view of things; for him the gardens were a job; for me, a hobby.

When Philip was born, I was a different person altogether. I had become accustomed to Dulough; I didn’t long to go back to Dublin anymore. In the evenings, we’d sit by the fire, the wind outside, the rain on the windows, the flames smoking when it blew down the chimney. Before the children went to bed, I’d read them stories, and afterwards, when we had the room to ourselves, I’d lie across the couch, my head on John’s lap, with Mrs. Connolly and Francis safely down in their cottage.

By the time I met John, his father was already dead, and his mum was dying up here, and putting a brave face on it, so that when Mrs. Connolly phoned to say she was gone, it came as a terrible shock. I offered to come to the funeral, I admit more out of curiosity to see where he was from than anything else. We’d only been together a few months, but it was enough that it would have seemed normal had I tagged along. That evening he said yes, but the following morning he’d changed his mind. I waved him off and went for a walk along the canal. Now I can imagine him and his brother traipsing out to the island, the men carrying the coffin, wary of their footing at the bottom of the rocks, moving slowly lest they drop it. She was buried in the evening, with the light on the water running down the sand, from cliffs to sea. When we buried Philip, it was in the afternoon, during a particularly low spring tide. It’s amazing that the sea still dictates so much here.

It’s hard to remember what I believed about John’s money at the beginning. He always seemed to have enough of it when he was in college, but life wasn’t particularly expensive then. As long as we could afford a loaf of bread, a tin of beans, and the odd night in the pub, we could stay alive quite happily. By the time we got married, I naively assumed that because he had this outlandish estate, he must also have a full bank account, a stash of vague, infinite wealth. He didn’t seem concerned about a career when we were in college—and this was when people were leaving for London after graduation because they couldn’t find jobs in Ireland.

When the children were very small, he took care to hide our financial troubles from me, but I began to notice the look on his face when the electricity bill had to be paid or when there was some big outlay for the house or the grounds. Planning ahead is not one of John’s strengths, though I admit he has many of them, though I admit I loved him so much when I married him that I could see almost no weakness. But he must have known that we would run out of money eventually. I wouldn’t have minded going out to work. I would have happily found myself something to do in those early days when I was mooning about the place, useless. In college, I wanted to be a teacher. Perhaps that salary wouldn’t have been enough, but it would have been something. John would never countenance such a thing, but if he’d been honest with me, we might have survived. I remember the night, the children in bed, Mrs. Connolly rattling about in the kitchen, when John asked me, out of the blue, “Do you see us living here forever? I mean, do you ever see yourself living anywhere else?”

“Not particularly.” I laughed. “I’m used to it now. It’s a good place to bring up the children.” I turned around, looked at him, and then understood it wasn’t a theoretical conversation. “Why?”

Rubbing the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger, he said, “Phil got most of the inheritance in exchange for me getting the house.” He sat back against the couch, the air gone out of him.

I didn’t realize that he’d talked to Phil the previous week, that they’d already decided Dulough’s fate. John’s brother had managed to become a solicitor, to steer college in the direction of something lucrative. We visited him and his wife at their house in Foxrock from time to time, a tidy red-brick with a soulless garden, weeded to within an inch of its life. The order of their existence was such a contrast to the inevitable disorder that came with living at Dulough that it was obvious why Phil had wanted no part of the estate. But, as I found out, it didn’t mean that Phil wouldn’t be devastated if it was sold—that he wouldn’t see John as a failure for losing hundreds of years of family history. As unfair as I thought his position was, I couldn’t help but agree that something beyond bricks and mortar, gardens, hills, and island would be lost. What would my husband have been without Dulough? He was as much part of the place as if he’d been constructed out of its soil. He thought he could have lived somewhere else, but he couldn’t have.

Kate and Philip were much more realistic about the move than I was. When we gathered them into John’s study last winter, it was Philip who understood the implications of the new arrangement. Where would it be forbidden for him to go now? He wanted a precise list, and when he realized that his bedroom in the big house would be off-limits but that other children—children he didn’t know—would be allowed in, I wondered what sort of damage we might be doing him.

Just before the funeral, Francis showed me the hut that Philip had been building on the island. I was amazed at the work that went into it; the little stones shoved into the cracks so as to keep the wind out, the bracken on the floor, the neat planks lined up across the roof, which he’d even thought to make sure were covered in creosote. The ingenuity of it.

We each had our rituals those late summer evenings after Philip died. I sat in the bay window of the upstairs sitting room, watching over the island until it got dark. Our daughter almost always emerged from somewhere below me—the forest, the avenue, the beach—and wandered about the gardens; sometimes she snapped deadheads or tried a cartwheel, others she sat cross-legged on the grass. I fretted about the damp seeping into her. But I found nothing serious to worry about in her behavior; these were all things she did before. The only difference now was that she was quieter, but wasn’t it to be expected?

One July evening, when I went downstairs and plunged outside, she found me. We walked back down the avenue, slapping our arms to keep the midges away. I could sense that she wanted to ask what I’d been doing, but something stopped her. Perhaps she didn’t want me to ask her the same question. So we each kept our silence. When we got back, Mrs. Connolly had put leftovers from the visitors’ cafeteria on the kitchen table: potato salad, cold chicken, carrot slaw, lasagna, brown bread, scones, puddings. I thought I would have to cook when we moved out of the big house, but, like a schoolgirl, I returned each evening to dinner ready for me. And each evening I pushed the puddings to the back of the fridge for John to devour when he got in. They would have done Kate no good anyway. I remember when I was exactly that age, the new fold of flesh around my middle, the tops of my arms like the beginnings of wings. I wanted to tell her that it wouldn’t last long, that it would be gone in a few years, but that would seem an eternity to her. So I hid the puddings and didn’t comment on the fact that she wouldn’t wear most of her clothes anymore, anything with buttons. I began planning a shopping trip to Dublin.

That night, we saw another of the films John had been renting for us. I have to admit, I was bowled over by the vigilance with which he watched over that stack, always making sure that there were new ones to see. They were films meant to appeal to women: romance, exotic countries, period pieces. I’m not sure what we would have done those nights without them. Reading seemed to take so much more energy than it used to. Though I’d often run my fingers along the bookshelves up at the house, there seemed to be nothing I wanted to open. What did we do in the evenings before? I can barely remember. The children played, I suppose, or finished up abandoned homework, left behind when the sun came out and we ran outside. John was fortunate to have his work, and it was good of him to realize that Kate and I would need something to keep us occupied, too.

We watched
Out of Africa,
and I sat there, trying to remember from the time John and I saw it years ago, whether there was a sex scene that I should be shielding her from. Then I thought that perhaps it didn’t matter so much now that she was almost a teenager. When Robert Redford washed Meryl Streep’s hair, down by the river, Kate said something very funny: “You couldn’t do that here, it’d be bloody freezing.” I don’t know where she picked up that word.

In the time between tucking Kate in and going to bed myself, I walked up to the house to see why John hadn’t come back yet. The staff had left for the day; the only light came from his study. I thought, when I peeped through the door, that he’d be poring over some of the plans for the Visitors’ Center or doing something vaguely worthwhile-looking or official. But he had his feet up on his desk and the chair was swinging back on its two legs, the way we always told the children not to. When I walked in, he very nearly fell, and I think it was the embarrassment of it that made him confess his plans for Kate then.

I still didn’t accept it. I didn’t think she’d be better off in Dublin. This wasn’t something we’d ever contemplated before, when there was no money, and having the money now wasn’t necessarily a good enough reason. When John came back, I wanted to tell him that we needed to shield her from those girls, the type of daughters his brother would eventually have, the type of girls I had to go to school with, who’d have played tennis and hockey all their lives, who’d have long, lean limbs and no generosity bred into them for girls like Kate. I wanted to say that she would be much better off at the school in town. If we didn’t think it was good enough, we could give her extra help in the evenings or spend the money on tutors, and she would be around the girls from here, who would have enough respect for this place to be nice to her. That would “socialize” her, as John put it, quite enough.