Black Lake (3 page)

In the bathroom, Philip looked out the window above the basin. He could see all the way down the valley. It was cold. When he’d finished brushing his teeth, he said, “Ha”—hard, into the air. His breath came out in a puff, misting the windowpane. Sometimes, in the middle of winter, he and Kate would go for days without having a bath, the thought of stepping from warm water into cold air too much for them. He tried again to remember the dream he’d been having before the men came and took his bed. It was about Dulough and the ice age, but he couldn’t remember the details. He looked around the bathroom. Would they come in here? There was nothing for them to take. Everything was bolted to the floor. But he slid the lock over just in case, wondering whether his mother had told the men that they could come into his room while he was still asleep.

The loo flushed next door. It was Kate.

“Did they take your bed?” he asked, letting her in. “They took mine. They woke me up.”

“I didn’t know they’d come already.” Kate sat down on the edge of the bath. “Are you nearly finished?”

Philip looked closely at her. “You’ve got stuff in your eyes. Here.”

He handed her the cloth and she passed it over her face, drops of water catching in her hair. Then he dipped it back in the basin and rubbed it over his own, taking care to delve into the corners of his eyes. It felt nice for one part of his body to be completely warm. Kate gave him a towel.

“Will you get my clothes from my room? They might still be there.”

“But I’m not dressed, either.”

“Will you just check they’re gone then?
Please
.”

He was eight and she was twelve. Sometimes, if he got the tone of his voice right, she would play big sister.

When Kate had given him the all clear, he went back to his room. His bed was gone and there were four rusty indentations on the carpet where the casters had dug in. He put his toe into one of them and twisted it around. His bedside table was gone too, as was the chair where he put his clothes. Only his wardrobe remained: There it stood, towering over the room now that everything else had disappeared. He opened it. Trousers, a shirt, and a jumper lay folded on the bottom shelf. The rest of his things had already been boxed up and taken down to the new cottage at the edge of the lake. He put on his clothes quickly. They were damp. It was always damp in Donegal, even in the middle of summer. Most mornings he draped his clothes over the electric heater in the corner of his room, but there was no time for that today, and besides, the heater was gone. His room looked too big without the furniture to fill it up. The carpet, which was the color of the grass on the tennis court, now looked as big and wide as the tennis court itself.

His room looked out over the back of the house, where hens scratched about in their run and sometimes laid eggs for his breakfast. Further out, at the beginning of the valley, was the barn. It was made of corrugated iron that had long ago begun to rust; sunlight and rain trickled freely through the holes in the walls and roof. It was where Francis kept the winter fodder for the deer and the fertilizer for the gardens. In behind the hay, an ancient Overland car decomposed. When they were younger, Kate and Philip used to sit up in the front seat, taking turns driving to Dublin—or, when their mother taught them about the Ottoman Empire, Constantinople. When a wheel gave way and the car lurched dangerously to one side, Francis told their parents not to let them play there.

The cushions that used to line the wide sill had been taken by the men and so Philip jumped up and stood in the recess. He had a better view of the valley than ever and he wondered why it had never occurred to him to try this before. Now he could see the mountains in the distance. The one with a summit like a boiled egg with the top lopped off was Mount Errigal, the highest mountain in Donegal, behind it was Muckish, or Dooish, he wasn’t sure. He liked those names and wondered if they had been picked by children. If they had, what sort of adults had allowed such a privilege?

He jumped down from the sill and landed with a thud on the carpet. What would he do today? What was he
supposed
to do today? Surely there would be no lessons with his mother this morning, and he couldn’t imagine what would happen in the afternoon. Usually, after he and Kate had lunch with Mrs. Connolly in the kitchen, they would go for a walk—if it was fine. Lately they’d been taking geography walks with their father, who would point out the features of the valley. Philip loved these afternoons. He saw much less of his father than his mother, despite the fact that his father’s study wasn’t far at all from the door to the upstairs drawing room where he and Kate did their morning lessons. When it rained, they would read books by the fire, curled up next to their mother. Kate was always the first to become restless, to walk to the window, to watch the water streaming down it, to suggest that they lived in the most boring place on earth. Their mother, Marianne, used to say, “Only boring people are bored,” but lately she had given up and taken to ignoring Kate as best she could. Philip was glad of this. He didn’t like feeling that it might have been better had they been born somewhere else—that there was a world sliding by without them.

It looked misty outside, but today there would be nowhere to read. Slumping onto the floor, his head banged against the bottom of the windowsill and then he banged it again, on purpose, for no good reason at all.

He sat there until his backside began to ache and he thought he’d better get up. He told himself that when he wanted to come back and look at Muckish and Dooish, he could. It was still his room. Dulough was still their house. Their father had told them so in his study after Christmas. He’d come to an arrangement with the government: Tourists would visit Dulough and the money they paid would fix the things that needed fixing, like the roof and the chimneys. It was very expensive to keep such a big house going and they didn’t have the money to do it on their own anymore. Philip thought that Francis could have fixed things, but he didn’t say it. The decision had been made.

On the landing it was surprisingly quiet. Philip had expected to see men everywhere, but aside from his feet creaking the same old floorboards that had creaked all his life, there was no sound. He wandered into the upstairs drawing room just in case he and Kate had been left some schoolwork to do. His mother would often leave them elaborate notes, assigning chapters to read, suggesting how long it might take them to do a certain lesson, how she would be back at a certain time (sharp!). But of course the drawing room was empty now, too. The long mahogany table where they did their work had left indentations in the carpet like the ones in his bedroom. The sofa with the sagging rose-patterned covers was gone, as was the sideboard that held all the board games and the old Meccano set. In the bay window, the wicker chair where his mother sat in the evenings had vanished too. The only thing left was the huge gilt-edged mirror, still hanging precariously above the fireplace. Philip looked up and saw himself reflected back, a scrawny boy in a green woolen jumper and blue corduroy trousers. He wondered if the mirror was being left behind for the tourists. With a bit of luck, he thought, it might squash one of them.

Above the main stairs, there was a long stain on the wall where the tapestry of the hunt had been. The hall was as dark as always, the only light coming in through the stained glass window at one end. Even on bright days, it was a gloomy, slightly frightening place, and on days like this, when the grayness seemed to have come down from the sky and settled on everything, he didn’t like to be there at all. Ordinarily he took the servants’ staircase, which began outside his bedroom door and went directly down into the kitchen. As the house didn’t have servants anymore (except for Mrs. Connolly, who wasn’t really a servant), he had never met anyone on the back stairs and considered them his territory.

Dulough’s front door was big and heavy. It would have taken two Philips standing side by side with their arms stretched out to span its width. He stood on the ends of his toes, reached the latch, and put all his weight into pulling it towards him. Day filled the hall. The gravel swept in a semicircle around the front door; it was filled with chairs, tables, sideboards, beds (he could see his own), cupboards, bedside tables, armchairs, sofas, the wicker chair from the upstairs drawing room, and a rolled-up carpet. It was as if the house had taken a great breath and spat out its insides.

Each piece of furniture had a label that said either “Cottage” or “Dublin” in his mother’s writing. He checked the labels on his things carefully; he was relieved to see that they all said “Cottage” on them.

Kate found him, sitting there on the rose-patterned couch, as she wove about the chaotic outdoor room. She was carrying an armful of plastic sheeting, which Philip recognized as the covering for the turf in the barn.

“We have to save all this before it’s ruined. Mum said.”

“Where is she?”

Kate was too busy pulling plastic over the dining room table to answer. He dragged a piece over to his bed. The sheets were still on it, just as he’d left them when the men took it away. He pulled them up.

“Come and help me with this, will you?” Kate shouted from the other side of the gravel, as she tried to cover the top of the very tall bookcases from the drawing room.

Philip made his way over to her.

“Why is all this stuff outside in the rain anyway?”

“Mum thinks the movers are useless,” Kate answered, matter-of-factly. “They’re over there, having lunch.”

Philip looked down the avenue and saw a white van parked there. A thermos rested on the dashboard. They were not the men who’d come into his room.

“It’s too early.” He looked at his watch.

“They got here at seven, so it’s their lunchtime now. They moved all the furniture when we were asleep.”

Philip didn’t like the idea that they had been dismantling the house as he slept upstairs. He thought that he shouldn’t have been able to sleep through that, that he should have somehow known what was going on.

“What are we going to
do
today?” he asked Kate. “What are we supposed to be
doing
—I mean, if we haven’t got schoolwork and stuff?”

“I think we’re supposed to be helping.”

“How?”

“I don’t know, ask someone.” She gestured to the bookcase.

He thought for a moment and said, “I’ll help you, but then I’m going to look for the others.”

When they had finished, the driveway looked like one of those slums in India that they’d seen in books, a plastic city with a life throbbing away underneath.

He rubbed the mist off his face with his sleeve and rounded the corner of the big house, passing between the pillars with the deer antlers on top. The avenue was rutted with puddles—he avoided them carefully because he wasn’t wearing his boots. His father had told them that minibuses would carry the visitors from the main road up to the house. He tried to imagine what it would be like when Dulough was full of people, when there’d be lots of little buses on the avenue. He followed the curve of the lake for half a mile or so before the cottages came into view. The Connollys’ was small and whitewashed, with a geranium-red half door and well-looked-after roses in the garden. Their own had appeared after Christmas—it magically grew out of the ground in the middle of the night, like a toadstool.

The only good part of this was that he’d be nearer to the Connollys—and the lake. Francis had taught him how to fish. Some days Philip would be summoned to their kitchen, with its frilly lace curtains and Virgin Marys lined up on the windowsill, for a decent meal. They were Francis’s words. You had to have a decent meal before going fishing; with a decent bit of food in you, you could stay still out there for hours. He had heard his mother say that Francis reminded her of Yeats’s fisherman. Philip found a book in the drawing room,
The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats.
He’d leafed through it until he came across the right poem. He agreed that a man with a “sun-freckled face” who went fishing at dawn was a good description of Francis, but he wasn’t sure what the rest of the poem meant.

Because the new cottage floated on a sea of deep, sticky mud, a long, thin plank connected the avenue with the front door. It wobbled as Philip stepped onto it. He knew that if he fell in without his boots on, he’d certainly be in trouble. So as to make sure he didn’t, he imagined that he was not surrounded with mud but with lava from a volcano. Mount Errigal had erupted after thousands of years, spewing its hot, liquid contents down the hillside. At any moment the new cottage and the Connollys’ could melt. His survival depended on balancing on this fireproof bridge until he was rescued. He took a final leap and landed on the front porch.

Inside, his new home looked more like the outline of a house than a real one. There was no carpet on the floors and the doors had still to be hung. None of the furniture from the big house had arrived yet. He had come because he thought he might find his mother, but he knew the house was empty the moment he came in. Where was she? Usually, when she had to leave them, she’d say where she was going, which could only have been one of a few places—to the garden or to see Mrs. Connolly or to talk to their father in his study. But now it was as if she had vanished. He wanted to tell her about the men taking his bed before he was ready.

He wandered first into what was to be his parents’ room. It was much smaller than their old one, whose great bay window looked out over the island, to the Atlantic. This room was dark; damp advanced up the walls. Though it was morning and the window was curtainless, it let in little light. Philip mentally positioned the bed, their wardrobe and chest of drawers, his father’s chair. He wondered how they’d all fit. Next he went into his new room. It was the twin of Kate’s; both rooms looked out over the lake at the back, the lake from which the house took its name: Dulough meant “black lake” in Irish. Francis had told Philip this because Philip hadn’t started learning Irish yet. It would be good to see the water each morning and to imagine all the fish teeming just below the surface, waiting to be caught. Perhaps they’d let him moor the boat there. He should have asked about that.