Black Lake (18 page)

But he insisted that I had to see his alma mater before I passed judgment. We went, just me and Kate, on a morning when the fog came down and settled on the mountains and the water in the air curled our hair before we were even out the front door. We hadn’t seen my parents since the funeral. When we arrived, they were pale and deferential. My mother drew Kate into a suffocating hug. They put us in the guest room, in the big double bed they bought when I moved to Donegal in the hopes that John and I would stay. We should have come more often. I knew that my mother wanted to ask how we were coping, how we
really
were, so the first night I went to bed at the same time as Kate, though it was only half past nine and my parents were settling down to a few more hours of television.

The next morning, we were on the road in good time for our ten o’clock appointment. Kate was quiet in the passenger seat. It’s a quiet I’ve got used to, with the odd sigh or breath, as if, tantalizingly, she might say something. The books tell me not to ask questions, to let her talk in her own good time, but sometimes it takes all my willpower not to say,
“What…What?”
I did wonder what she was thinking that morning. Was she hiding her relief at the thought of escaping Dulough, or was she suddenly afraid of going so far away to school? That was how little I understood her then. As I drove, I tried to pinpoint the moment I stopped knowing what she was thinking. I searched for an illustrative event, a day when her behavior suddenly surprised me, but I couldn’t think past May; it was as if a fog came down over that part of my mind, as if my memories were like the Donegal mountains—covered. Perhaps it was my brain protecting me; they are, we’re always being told, amazing things. I looked over at her, but she was resolutely staring out the window.

The school was a disappointment. To listen to John, you’d think it was a paradise second only to Dulough. It was true that he’d kept the friends he made there, perhaps more so than the ones he’d made in college. It had relocated to the suburbs since he went, though, the precious land in the middle of town making the school enough money to have much bigger grounds on the outskirts of the city. From its reputation, I expected grand buildings, rolling lawns—to be at least a little intimidated. But a roundabout guided the car onto a long and badly maintained tarmac road, to the right of which were several squat, concrete buildings. In the distance I saw portacabins like the makeshift offices used by Mr. Murphy. It was ugly, and I felt hope rise in me that Kate wouldn’t like it.

A woman came to meet us at the front door of the main building. She was the head of the French Department. It was clear that this was her calling, that she took a particular pleasure in selling the school. “Welcome, Katherine! You”—she glanced at Kate—“can call me Madame Fitzgerald, and you”—she said to me with a wink—“can call me Vivienne.”

Kate listened to Madame Fitzgerald politely on the tour, inclining her head, looking her in the eye. I wondered when we’d managed to teach her such good manners. Then, out of nowhere, this woman said to our daughter, “And am I to understand it that you’ve recently had a bereavement in the family?”

“My brother drowned in May.”

Yes, he drowned in May, fast, in a matter of seconds, barely ten feet from the beach, with Francis running down the headland and wading into the water. Kate could say it aloud, at twelve, and there I was, nearing forty and lost for words.

“
Ne t’inquiète pas,
Kate,
on s’occupera bien de toi ici.
Do you know what that means? We’ll look after you here.”

And I was outraged that John had told them, that he’d sent me down unarmed. And worse, Kate.

At the hockey grounds, Madame Fitzgerald nodded to an artificial grass pitch surrounded by floodlights. Girls in short gray skirts, their mouths protruding with gum shields, passed balls back and forth. “That,” Madame Fitzgerald said with reverence, “is the first eleven. They’re getting a head start.” And when Kate and I looked blank, she added, “For the season.” Kate studied the girls, with no idea what a first eleven was. None of them looked up or seemed to take any notice of their French mistress leading us around, but there was a self-consciousness to their playing, a tight showiness to their passes that suggested to me that they knew they were part of the advertisement.

The last leg of the tour was the dorms. The girls shared cubicles made for two, a narrow bed on each side, little lockers, a wardrobe, and a chest of drawers. The mattresses were thin, the walls covered in stains left behind by Blu-Tack. I tried to imagine Kate whispering to the girl in the next bed after lights-out.

Outside, I thanked Madame Fitzgerald and told her that we would be able to find our way back to the car park ourselves.

“So, what did you think?” I asked Kate.

“I don’t want to play hockey.”

“You don’t have to, darling,” I said, rejoicing.

“I think Madame Fitzgerald said you did. She said everyone plays.”

“You could swim. It couldn’t possibly be as cold as it is at Dulough.” I looked at her and smiled, feeling generous, relieved.

“Yes,” she said, tiredly. “I
could
swim, I suppose.”

She talked as I drove us into town. She asked what it was like to grow up in Dublin. I told her that it was not as nice as growing up in Donegal. Did she realize what a privileged childhood she’d had—that most children don’t live in big houses and ramble infinitely?

For lunch, we went to Grafton Street, to the Bewley’s that isn’t Bewley’s anymore. John and I used to go there when the pubs closed. The first time I brought him, he was taken aback at having late-night breakfasts, having been brought up under a regime of set meals at set times, but I soon got him hooked.

The new owners had kept the old chairs and the stained glass windows, which I was glad of. The menu these days was all panini and pizzas. We each had a caprese panino. I imagined that Italians would be appalled by what passes for their staple in Ireland, watery cheese and a couple of cold, tasteless tomato slices on a baguette. Kate asked to try my coffee. She sipped and made a face. I laughed. She wasn’t so grown-up yet.

We shopped at random, wandering in and out of inappropriate places, neither of us knowing where to go. I was struck by the cheapness of even expensive clothes, by the bad quality of the fabric, by the shoddy cuts. Kate ran her hands along jeans, sweatshirts; she avoided dresses and skirts like the plague. It was a relief to buy her some new clothes; even if I didn’t much like her choices, I was glad she’d be less self-conscious now. In the changing rooms, we looked at each other in the mirror. I could be passing my flesh on to her: As my body collapses in on itself, hers grows.

That night, when Kate was brushing her teeth, my dad called me into the sitting room. I was worried he was going to ask me about Philip. Instead he said, “You’re in for a bit of weather.” I looked at the forecast; there were big swirls over the Atlantic. To be honest, I was glad to have an excuse to leave earlier than we meant to; the sooner I got Kate away from the pull of the city, the better.

The next day, we did the journey back up in less than four hours. A record for us. It felt good to see John waiting there at the window, to know that he’d been looking forward to us getting back, that he’d felt our absence. I swung the car into the driveway. Kate got out, gave him a very teenager-y hug, and went off, lugging her shopping bags into the house. He came around to my door and spent the rest of the hug that was intended for Kate on me. And out of the blue I was crying, quite literally, on his shoulder. “Did something happen in Dublin?” I shook my head like a child, no, nothing in particular. He held on to me there as I soaked his shirt, so that afterwards he had to find another one. Now that I knew she didn’t want to go to that school, I found that I was nearly able to forgive him for trying to send her.

When I’d finished, he made me a cup of instant coffee and told me that he and Francis had spent the day looking for the deer herd and battening down the hatches. He’d even taken the Buddha and hidden him in the shed. I began to worry about the new garden, exposed up there on the hill, the rhododendrons not big enough to shield it yet.

As we sat at the kitchen table, Kate came out in a new pair of jeans and a t-shirt, but, God bless him, I don’t think John’s noticed the changes in her body. She moved noisily about, making herself a cup of tea.

Later on, the wind became a living thing. I could hear it gathering in the hills, rushing towards the cottage, hurling itself at our bedroom window, so that I worried the glass might blow in. It was impossible to sleep. John regretted not staying up at the house, picturing what he might find in the morning. I reminded him that it wasn’t the first storm, that we were well prepared. But my imagination wasn’t far behind his. Outside, in the darkness, I could picture the trees bending with the wind, plants uprooted and carried away, walls toppled, and fierce waves. I pulled my mind back from the island as best I could, from the blackness that surrounded it, from the gales that blew over it, from the loneliness that enveloped it on a night like that.

We emerged early in the morning, almost sleepless, moments after the Connollys came out into their own front garden. We walked down the avenue, the five of us, and rounded the main gates. The house was untouched. We surveyed it thoroughly—there was not a broken window or a fallen drainpipe, and we could see no evidence of tiles having come off the roof. Mrs. Connolly went to the kitchen to get a head start on the day’s baking and Francis went off in search of the deer. John walked with me through the grounds and up to my garden on the headland. It had been more or less spared too. We stood side by side, looking out at the dark, flat sea, the calm of it making us wonder whether the wind and rain had really ever happened at all. Then we saw the island. The point on the horizon which had been occupied by the church was empty.

We scrambled down to the beach and up the slippery rocks. The church had collapsed in on itself, the walls toppling into the nave, crushing the last of the soft, rotten pews. Even the marble altar was chipped and cracked from the falling debris. John picked his way amongst the mess and ended up squatting next to Philip’s grave. I was glad we hadn’t chosen the headstone yet; there had been nothing for the storm to damage. I knelt down behind my husband, the wet of the long grass seeping through to my knees, and leant my head against his back.

Further up the coast, the sea had climbed over the public beach and washed through a row of cottages, taking chairs and tables and beds with it. Fortunately, the inhabitants had known what was coming and had left in time. In the days that followed, the water disgorged some of their possessions and they lay along the beach, wrapped in seaweed. The former owners didn’t go down and clear up their furniture. It surprised me that they could stand to look out their windows each day and watch as their things rotted away. Mrs. Connolly told us that the priest had organized a bus for them to go over to the Ikea in Scotland.

I knew without asking John that the church would be left as it was; if the visitors weren’t allowed out there, the state would have no inclination to rebuild. After the initial shock of it, John was happy that a monument to the first Philip was gone. I was relieved for a different reason: I’d been dreading the day that one of the tourists would break the rules and explore the island. Now they were much more likely to leave it alone.

The next week, Kate came to my garden. I watched her emerge from the trees and trek up the slippery path. It was the first time she’d taken any interest in it, and I have to admit that I enjoyed showing her what I’d planted and telling her how it would be when it was properly finished. “You used to like gardening, darling. Do you remember—when you were little? You tried to grow sunflowers.”

She nodded and twirled one of her boots in the muck. And the knowledge was with me suddenly, coupled with the satisfaction of realizing that I did (at least this time) still know what she was thinking.

“So you’re going to go to that school.”

“Dad said I should tell you myself.”

I nodded and went back to my digging. The satisfaction I got from reading her, and from realizing that it was John who’d convinced her, went away, and there I was, mud up to my ankles, my daughter standing in front of me, decently waiting for me to respond so that she could make me feel better. I bent down to pull away the roots of some tangled weeds and flung them to one side. Watching the toe of her boot twirl in the bed, I sensed her weight shift from one leg to the other. When it became clear that I wasn’t going to speak, the boots sucked themselves up out of the ground and walked away down the hill and into the trees.

Before she had fully disappeared into the forest, I followed her, sliding on the steep path, falling on my behind more than once, the damp seeping into the backs of my thighs, the slather of mud across my trousers. I shouted to her disappearing back and I saw her duck down, commando-like, in the undergrowth. What was there to do but walk past, not seeing her, calling her name in the opposite direction, and pretend to give up, as I watched her crawl out and run down the path, to safety, away from her mother?

She stayed away from me completely after that, passing the weeks before she went to school in the kitchen amongst the girls from town, whose younger brothers and sisters she would have been in class with, with whom, judging from the laughter I heard as I tiptoed about the house, she would have got on very well.