by Johanna Lane
The table was set and Mrs. Connolly had gone next door to cook for Francis, leaving instructions with Philip as to when to turn off the oven. His mother and Kate arrived first, their faces flushed from the gardens; they had been labeling the trees and shrubs, they said, so that the visitors would know what they were. Philip’s stomach fell; they’d been the ones sticking the little spikes into the ground. He’d assumed it was the gardeners.
“I looked for you,” Kate said to Philip. “Where were you?”
Philip glanced at his mother, but she seemed to be busy taking off her boots and tucking her hair back into place in the mirror on the coatrack. He shrugged at Kate, who said, “You’re always going off on your own these days.”
“You’ll be in very serious trouble if you go out to the island on your own again, do you understand me, Philip?”
So she had been listening. It was the second time in the space of an hour he’d been asked whether he understood something. “Yes,” he felt like shouting, “YES!” But he knew that it would make her angry, so instead he said to himself, yes, yes, he understood, no dinners at the big house and no going to the island.
It had been half an hour since Philip turned off the oven, but the roast was still hot, and from time to time it let off a crack! as if to remind them that it was there and ready to be eaten. A few minutes earlier, Kate had let out a sigh and opened one cupboard after another, looking for something to eat while she waited. She found the end of a loaf in the bread bin and, without offering it to their mother or him, she began to gnaw on the corner. Philip knew that she was punishing him for his caginess about where he’d been that day and the days before, and that she was punishing their mother for making them wait for their father.
They were all starving by the time his father arrived back. It was a quarter to eight, much later than they usually had supper. The rain had blown through the door with him, adding another patch to the floor. “Hope that’s not down for the weekend,” he said, as he pulled off his boots, “or we’ll be washed out of it tomorrow.”
“You’re very late, darling.” And from her voice Philip could tell that she was scolding his father, but more gently than she would scold the children. His parents were always polite to each other.
“Am I?” He looked up at the kitchen clock. “Am I? Yes, I’m sorry, well, we’re all here now, it’s a celebration of sorts, I suppose.”
His father put his hands on the back of Philip’s chair. Philip could feel his breath and smell the wax emanating from his coat after the rain.
“Mrs. Connolly went to a lot of trouble. I hope it’s not cold,” his mother said.
It was then that his father understood that he’d held up dinner, that they’d all been sitting there waiting for him. “No, no, lovely,” he said cheerfully, rubbing his hands together. “Shall I carve?”
He was relieved to see his father at the head of the table and his mother at the foot; there would at least be some resemblance to the ceremony of roast-eating up at the big house. Philip took great care in constructing his first bite, a little bit of meat and some potato covered in gravy. It hadn’t got cold. Each of them, even his mother, ate quickly, as if they hadn’t eaten in days and wouldn’t eat again for a long time. No one spoke until their plates were empty. This was unusual because his parents disapproved of eating too fast, and both believed in the importance of good conversation at dinner.
There was silence as they sat back, stunned at how quickly they’d finished, at how long it had been since they’d had a decent meal. Then, as if he were about to make a toast, Philip’s father pushed his chair back and stood up, his water glass raised. “As you all know,” he paused and sat down again, “as you know, this is an important time for Dulough, which means it’s an important time for us, too. There will be a lot of people here, which is going to feel very strange at first because we’re not used to it, but we will get used to it; we might even come to quite like it, but we have to do our part to make the whole thing a success.”
Philip put his hand up. “Who are they?”
His father rubbed his forehead. “Well,” he said slowly, so that it sounded more like “we-ell.” “You’ll probably recognize some faces from town, and the rest will be tourists, French, American, German…that sort of thing. But the important part is that we make them welcome, that we show them we like having them here, even if we’re not quite sure how we feel about it at the moment. Which means that we must always be polite when we speak to them and we mustn’t get in their way or make them feel as if they might be intruding. We mustn’t go into the house during visiting hours and we can’t play in the gardens when the visitors are trying to have a nice quiet time of it.”
“But, darling, where exactly are the children expected to play?”
Philip was surprised at this. He hadn’t thought that his mother much cared where they played anymore.
Kate said, “I don’t really play.”
“Well, then, where are the children expected to have space to—”
His father interrupted her. “They can go to the lake, the hills, they can play here in the cottage…The visitors will take up a relatively small part of the place, you know.”
His mother opened her mouth to say something else but, thinking better of it, closed it again. Philip thought he knew what she was about to say: “Yes, but they’re taking up the most important parts…”
Dinner was to end there as Mrs. Connolly had not thought of pudding. Kate got up and again started rifling through the cupboards; this time she found their mother’s stash of Cadbury Fingers, high up, where Philip would never have been able to see them. He took two, but no one else seemed to want one now, not even Kate. Before he finished the second biscuit, his mother got up and went into her bedroom. His father wavered a moment before following her. Philip thought worriedly about the blood trail on the file and hoped it was too dark in there for them to notice it.
John
When the day of the opening arrived, John missed breakfast to go up to the house and check that everything was ready. He imagined that Mr. Murphy and his staff must have stayed up very late getting things finished and presentable for the visitors. John had offered to help them, but they had made it quite clear that the arrangement of the furniture would have little to do with how it had been before and that they didn’t need his input. It was just as well; he was happy to go to bed. But he had hovered on that precipice between sleeping and waking all night; when he slept he dreamt, and when he was awake, he was conscious of staying extremely still so as not to wake Marianne. Now there was a stinging around his eyes from the lack of sleep that would turn into a headache by the end of the day.
John had paid more attention to the house in the last month than in all the years before the move. He noticed that the intense brightness of the new electric lights, installed at Murphy’s behest, changed the character of the rooms entirely. It had the aura, not of a lived-in place, but of a museum whose curators were eager that visitors shouldn’t miss a detail. The drawing room was arranged as a picture of genteel hospitality; the threadbare sofas had been replaced with a rather uncomfortable-looking, harder affair, tightly upholstered in royal blue velvet. A book lay open on the table, designed to appear as if someone had just set it down. John ducked under the rope to get a look at what it was: The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Though he was not a poetry man, he quite liked Yeats and wondered if he might replace this book with another. He thought he’d better not; he imagined that someone had picked it for a very particular set of reasons. The ropes, which bisected the room and indicated where visitors should stand, gave it the appearance of an ocean liner caught in a storm, as if all the furniture had slid to one side. They only added to the feeling that no one had ever really lived there. As he turned to leave, he noticed a pair of velvet slippers by the fireplace and wondered who they were meant to belong to: a fictional him, the real him? John half suspected that the history he’d written had gone straight into the bin and that Murphy
had produced a story of a different family, a family more in keeping with the image they wanted to project.
Though the drawing room had been badly altered, the dining room looked better than usual. All the silver, porcelain, and crystal, unused since his wedding day, was laid out, shining, pristine, as if the president herself were coming to dinner. A bowl of very real-looking unreal fruit had been placed on the sideboard. There was less furniture than there had been in his time; it gave the room a more stately appearance.
As John mounted the stairs to inspect the bedrooms, he heard Mrs. Connolly’s voice above the din of young women in the kitchen. He moved through Kate’s room first and then Philip’s; great care had been taken to make them seem lived-in, despite the ropes. In Kate’s, one of those hoops that Victorian children would keep going with a stick was propped against the wall. How absurd, he thought—it was a toy for a child from a hundred years ago. In Philip’s, his old train set was sitting in the corner, ready to be played with.
In John’s own room, the bed had been made up with frilly, expensive sheets and a gold-trimmed bolster. A pair of silk pajamas were laid out on one side and a nightdress, very similar to the one that Marianne really did wear, had been unfurled on the other. Though he knew that it could only be coincidence, especially as every other detail had been quite wrong, John snatched up the pajamas and the nightie, balling them under his arm as he went downstairs.
While the rest of the house was silent, the kitchen was alive. The big table in the middle of the room was covered in trays of scones that had just come out of the oven. An assembly line of three girls was making cucumber sandwiches by the range, a similar line opposite them was making ones with egg. Mrs. Connolly came out of the scullery in her apron, tea towel in hand. She was pulling her fingers away from her palms, as one might open the petals of a flower. It was a characteristic gesture of hers; they were curled stiff with arthritis. John thought that all this must be a welcome change from keeping the house clean and making dinner for the family. He was almost as fond of Mrs. Connolly as he had been of his mother. He watched her now, moving around the kitchen, cajoling the local girls, making sure they were doing things right.
It reminded him of the party he’d had for Marianne a few years after their wedding. He had never organized a party in his life before. At college, it was always Marianne moving through the crowd, talking to everyone, beckoning him from where he stood at the edge of the group, watching. He should have seen it coming, her loneliness. At first, she had thrown herself into life on the estate, bought a set of clothes she thought befitted country life, learnt to drive, shown an interest in the running of the place. But one morning Mrs. Connolly had taken him aside to tell him that Marianne sometimes didn’t get out of bed until lunch or, if John was due to be away all day, dinner. It was lonely for her, Mrs. Connolly said; she was used to life in Dublin, he needed to pay more attention to his wife. It was the only rebuke John had ever received from the old woman.
Mrs. Connolly wasn’t the first to have pointed out that he lived in his own world. Marianne herself had used different words to say something similar in the early days of their relationship—and to add that he would have to change if they were to remain a couple. He had apologized, he saw her point, but it was only because he and his brother had enjoyed an unusual amount of solitude as children; when he was alone, there had been no one else to think of. Marianne had smiled ruefully and nodded.
But after Mrs. Connolly’s warning, he phoned each of their friends to ask them back to Dulough for the first time since the wedding. When he told Marianne, on a Friday morning, that the old crowd would be arriving that afternoon, a slow smile spread across her face and she went to look for her city clothes. They all went swimming that evening, drunk, just as it was getting dark. She found him in the corner of the pool and kissed him. He remembered the others cheering, his own happy embarrassment.
He was filled with shame now, as he stood in the door of the kitchen, that he’d allowed Marianne to become unhappy again.
“Just came up to see how it’s going, Mrs. Connolly,” he called out.
All activity stopped and the girls, with their healthy, innocent faces, turned towards him. He was struck by the difference between them and the young women he’d seen in Stephen’s Green. The housekeeper came over and the girls went back to work, whispering. John was momentarily distracted by how clean Mrs. Connolly seemed, not simply on a superficial level, though she certainly was; but there was a smooth clarity to her skin, her eyes, that seemed to radiate from her insides, like the pictures of the Virgin Mary that hung on the walls of her house. She pinned a stray wisp of hair up as she came towards him; she had no bun or chignon to speak of, but an intricate series of clips kept her scant hair in place. She had worn the same style as long as he’d known her, which was all his life and a good portion of hers. “It’s going fine.” She pinned the last wisp into place. “Did you get your breakfast?”
“Well, no, but…”
“The girls”—she nodded her head in the vague direction of the cucumber sandwich assembly line—“had a fry-up this morning. There’s some bacon left over. It’s on a plate in the oven and I’ll do you an egg.”
John had come to realize years ago that, to Mrs. Connolly, a good meal cured most ills. Even now he remembered the spread she’d put out after his mother’s funeral—and probably his father’s—although he couldn’t quite remember that far back. “You have your hands full. I think I can manage to fry myself an egg.”
He saw her consider this for a moment. Usually, she wouldn’t even let him pour his own tea. She went over to the range and lifted down a small frying pan. Turning to one of the girls nearest to her, she said, “Put a slab of butter in there, would you, Clare? And give the gentleman help if he needs it.”
Clare turned to look at John; she was a lovely girl with fine, honey-colored hair. Her defining feature was a large mole on her left cheek, which was really quite beautiful, he thought. She couldn’t have been more than seventeen. John smiled as he walked towards the range. “Thank you, Clare.” She cracked the egg into the frying pan. “I don’t want to interrupt you, I’ll be quite all right.”
Once Mrs. Connolly and Clare had gone back to their tasks, John became excruciatingly aware of his body and the space it took up in that kitchen full of young women. As he pushed at the corners of the fried egg with a spatula, he realized that he was going to have to eat in here, that there was nowhere else for him to go. When the egg was done, he slid it onto a paper plate and turned around. Every surface was covered—in scones, butter, jam, teacups, milk jugs, sandwiches, dirty plates and bowls, heaps of tea towels and forks; there was nothing to do but eat standing by the range. He slid a fork out from one of the piles and took a bite. Girls turned around from time to time to get a look at him. When he had finished, he thanked Clare, who was given no time to answer, and was out the door.
Philip
The night before the opening, Philip dreamt, as he had the morning of the move, of Dulough during the ice age, of the valley swathed in snow, of the ice pushing down and gouging out the earth, pulling it towards the sea. There were things stuck in the glacier: boulders, their car, the big house itself. When he looked in the windows, he could see that there were people inside, gazing out at the frozen world.
When he finally woke, the memory of his dream was so real that he felt heavy, as if his limbs, too, were encased in ice. He fought to remember where he was. Opening his eyes, he could see that his mother had left out his good clothes on the chair by the door. She had been in his room while he slept; he didn’t like that. He thought of how the men had taken his bed. The visitors were to arrive today, and, though he knew that technically they weren’t allowed in the cottage, he was worried that they might come into his new bedroom anyway. When he got up, the air was damp and cold, as if the mist had invaded the house.
On the avenue, big drops slipped from rhododendron leaves into puddles. Philip saw Francis high up in the vall
ey. He hadn’t said much about opening Dulough to the visitors, and he was the sole adult who wasn’t throwing all his energy into the preparations. His only reaction had been to erect a new deer fence around the house. Philip had seen him talking to the workmen from Dublin one day, showing them how to get a fence post into land that was lined with rock. When Francis turned and walked back off to his shed, one of the men gave him a mock salute. Francis couldn’t have seen it, but Philip noticed that he didn’t have much to do with them after that.
The front door of the big house stood open and a red ribbon hung in the frame. Philip went to the porch and peered inside. Lights on metal stands blazed into the hall. It was an utterly different place; the chessboard tiles on the floor shone, and shadows—of the sideboard, the hat stand, and the telephone table—fell in new ways. Though every corner of the once dark room had been illuminated, the light somehow made it less real, as if they were in a film. Philip had the sensation of knowing the room well and not knowing it at all.
In the drawing room, thick blue ropes hung from brass stands, which stood in a row, like sentries, down the middle of the carpet. Plastic matting covered the floor on the near side of the ropes, and on the far side, a sofa and chairs that Philip didn’t recognize had been arranged into a fireplace scene. A book lay open on a side table. Philip unhooked the ropes and went to get a better look; it was the one with Francis as the fisherman: The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. It was a faded, battered green, with gold lettering. He wished he’d thought to protect it on the day of the move. He scanned the shelves for another that looked like it; the only one he could find was a book about how to identify species of rare trees. Picking up the Yeats and slipping it into his pocket, he put the new one facedown on the table and opened the door as quietly as he could.
