by Johanna Lane
Without looking up, he said, “When the people here were very hungry, the men often went without—or ate only the skins of the potatoes—so as to feed their families. No one told them that the skins were poisonous. That’s probably why there were no men in that house.”
Olivia pointed out that she had often eaten the skin of a new potato.
“Well,” Geoffrey said, glancing up at her, “if you ate almost nothing but them for months on end, you would die, too.”
He had almost got to the end of the pile when one letter made him stop. He read it intently and read it again. It was written on blue vellum, the handwriting unmistakably a woman’s. When Geoffrey had bought Lough Power, not long after Olivia and Philip stayed there as a boardinghouse, her husband didn’t hide his disapproval of Geoffrey’s reputation. He wouldn’t tell her why he held this artist in such low esteem, but once, when a guest of theirs mentioned he was to stay with Geoffrey after his time at Dulough, Philip suggested he leave then and there. Snippets of gossip had reached Olivia over the years; Geoffrey had been married once but was reported to have had children with women other than his wife. She never asked him about any of this. After all, what right had she? She wondered now if that letter was from a woman who had a claim over him. She was consumed with fear that he might have to leave.
Geoffrey got up to pour himself a drink when the dinner gong rang. Without a word, he picked up the letter and put it in his pocket. As they walked across the hall, Olivia saw that he had filled his glass to the brim, as if gin were water.
When I looked properly at the piece of newspaper article that had been sticking out of the diary, I saw that it was from the year John held the party for me, not long after we were married. At first I was touched that he had looked to Olivia for advice on how to entertain at Dulough, but the more I read of her writing, the angrier I became that he’d kept her diaries to himself. Why hadn’t he given me access to them when they could have done me so much good, when they could have taught me that one gets used to the remoteness, when they could have taught me about Dulough’s history, so that I could have felt it was as much my home, too?
I got up off the floor, my knees aching. Picking up the little stack of diaries I’d accumulated, I put them back in the safe. I wouldn’t have seen the key hanging just inside the door had the back of my hand not grazed the hook.
I knew, just as I had known that Kate had decided to go to school, the knowledge settling on me easily, unequivocally, that it was the key to the third floor, to what had been intended as Dulough’s ballroom. No other door in the house was locked. John had told me—and the children—that the key was lost, that no one had been up there since the house was built.
If I was going to try to get in, I had to do it then. In a few hours it would be dark; in the morning, the tours would start again—and then John would be home. He was staying with Phil in Foxrock until the end of the week. He said that it was to get his brother “up to speed” on estate business, but he probably wanted to get away from me. I don’t think I’d said five words to him since Kate told me she was going to that school.
On the landing, I realized I was alone in the house for the first time since I’d arrived at Dulough: no husband, no children, no Mrs. Connolly. I thought about Olivia’s maid, Áine, whose mother had lost seven of her twelve children by the time Áine came to work here. Was that worse than losing one? Or two? Because hadn’t I lost Kate as well? It settled on me that at the beginning of the summer I’d had two children and that now I had none.
My friend Liesl had a baby a couple of years ago. I couldn’t phone her to tell her about Philip; I couldn’t phone anyone. John did what needed to be done on that front; he was even the one to tell my parents, which was wrong of me. Liesl saw the announcement in the newspaper and wrote a very kind letter, but I wasn’t able to cope with sympathy at all afterwards. I still can’t. Especially face-to-face. There’s something awful about looking into someone else’s eyes and seeing the terrible thing that’s happened to you reflected back—or the fear that it could happen to them—or the gratefulness that it didn’t. Mrs. Baskin, the chemist, stopped me and John a month or so after Philip died. She was crying. At first I assumed something had happened to her, but then I understood that she was crying for us. I wanted to slap her. I could see that John was embarrassed by how curt I was, but he couldn’t chastise me then.
In many ways, Francis has been the best of everyone. He’d be surprised to hear that, no doubt, but just afterwards the only thing keeping me sane was him, beside me in my little garden, helping me get something into the ground, or doing the heavy work I couldn’t do. I could have asked some of the new groundsmen; they’re all perfectly nice, but I don’t want them to think they should be including my garden in their day-to-day business. Francis never comes up without being asked. He talks so little, and when he does it’s only about the plants. This is the greatest kindness anyone has done me in the past few months.
I haven’t thought much about how he must have felt. Francis didn’t tell us that he was watching Philip from the headland when he drowned. It was in the statement he gave to the police. I do remember him playing watchdog that day, prowling around the grounds, irritating John, who thought it gave a bad impression to the tourists. Of course it wouldn’t have been Francis’s place to criticize the new arrangements, but it was easy to see that he thought it wasn’t a good idea, this opening up of the demesne to visitors. He wouldn’t have known, of course, that we’d run out of money to pay him and Mrs. Connolly, but I still think that if we’d explained it, they would have wanted to stay; they’re both eligible for a government pension now. John thinks that he’s the only one with allegiances to Dulough, that the Connollys would leave if they weren’t paid. But he’s selling them short; once you’ve lived at Dulough, it’s impossible to imagine living anywhere else.
Mrs. Connolly told us that she’d chastised Philip for taking some Coke from the restaurant before he’d run away. But I’ve never blamed her; I had an inkling what he was up to the day I caught him coming up from the beach, claiming he’d been digging for lugworms, with no bucket, with no evidence whatsoever of that. I knew he was up to something, and I should have tried harder to find out what it was.
It doesn’t say in the statement at what point Francis realized that Philip was going to try to swim out to the island, it just says, “I went down to the beach,” but he would have torn off like a hare when he understood what was happening. He wouldn’t have had a chance of reaching Philip in time, though; it’s a long old way down from the top of the cliffs.
I was standing on the avenue in front of the house, talking to a French tourist. And I saw her eyes flick up over my shoulder. I remember thinking how rude she was, that she’d asked me some question or other about the gardens and now she wasn’t bothering to hide that she was bored. But the way she looked past me must have made me turn. There was Francis walking towards us with something in his arms. I didn’t realize it was Philip straightaway, but then I saw that Francis was wet, and that the thing in his arms was wet. I suppose people would have crowded around, but I don’t remember. I only have pieces of that day now, there’s no cartilage there, nothing joining the events in my mind. If I looked closely I know I’d be able to see them, but I turn my thoughts away, to getting the gardens ready for winter, to whether I might go and stay with Liesl for a while, to how Kate’s getting on at her new school.
The door to the third floor wasn’t difficult to open. On the other side was a rough wooden staircase, waiting to be polished and carpeted as befitted the approach to a ballroom.
The ballroom ran the length and width of the house; from the top of the stairs, I could barely see the far end, where a set of three rectangular windows with curved tops looked out over the front gardens. On the gable walls, identical black granite fireplaces faced each other like sentries. The walls were unpainted, the floors unfinished, but it was more complete than John had admitted. To have lived below this for so long,
and not to have sensed, somehow, the vastness of the space above us, seemed impossible to me.
By the time the light began to fade, I had all I’d need. The last thing I did was return to John’s study and take the diaries, years upon years of them. When I was finished, it was completely dark, not only in the ballroom but in the rest of the house as well. I dared not turn on the lights in case the Connollys saw. Creeping about with a candle, it wasn’t lost on me that I may as well have gone back in time, Olivia’s writings disturbed, the ballroom opened up again.
Instead of returning to the cottage, I wandered through the house, prodding the burnt patch in front of Philip’s fireplace, shoving my fingers into a hole in the dining room wall, looking for other such marks, trying to attach them to events; a careless housemaid (a near catastrophe), the corner of the table catching as those boys moved it out of the way for Olivia’s dance. It is not difficult to think of the house as a consciousness, a repository of events, its breath whistling through the walls, our lives playing over and over again in its memory. This is as close as I get to ghosts.
I got to the ballroom early the next morning, before Mrs. Connolly arrived in the kitchen. I had meant to clean. Instead, I took my coffee and sat on the floor in front of the big windows. I could see from the gardens all the way to the horizon. The sea was calm, the sun catching the island. Below me, one of the groundsmen was raking the gravel, something we’d never thought to do in our time, but the minibuses wreak havoc on it when they turn to go back down to the car park, a smattering of tourists inside. There wasn’t a weed to be found in the gardens, and the lawn remained perpetually—although I never saw them cutting it—at two inches. Dulough had become foreign to me: the perfect grass, the dustless rooms, the lights so bright that there could have been no illusion whatsoever of a home.
When Philip the First told Olivia of his plans for the ballroom, she was astonished. His religion frowned on dancing, even forbade it. But this was when she learnt about his pride. It was not simply the land with which he wanted to impress their guests but the house, too. Philip’s architect, Charles Wrenn-Harris, had convinced her husband that no house could be considered grand without a ballroom. And so he had acquiesced, as long as it was situated on the third floor, as long as it looked like an afterthought, which in many ways it was.
Or he had acquiesced until he saw it, until he walked up the rough, unfinished stairs and entered the huge room, with Olivia behind him, her heart leaping for joy. Two grand marble fireplaces would blaze the damp and cold out before the guests arrived, and…
“No” was all he said before striding out. She followed him, not wanting to ask what he meant, but knowing all the same. The next day, the carpenters were summoned. She came upon them early, on her way down to breakfast. The door to the ballroom was open and they had begun to dismantle the stairs. She hurried past, not wanting them to see her cry. By the time breakfast was finished, the stairs were gone completely; the threshold of the ballroom hung in midair above her, unreachable without a ladder. Later that day her husband locked the door and put the key in the safe. She had her revenge, though: The same carpenters were summoned to put the stairs back again when he died, but she was too decorous to hold a ball during her mourning period—and when Geoffrey Roe came along, her interest in society evaporated.
When my coffee was gone, I began to clean. There were ripples of dust on the floor like the ripples left on the beach when the tide goes out. It would have been much quicker if I’d had the Hoover, but I couldn’t risk that sort of noise. I swept the whole space, stopping when I heard the murmur of voices downstairs, the first tour group of the day. They were beginning to get smaller, the summer over. Some days no one signed up and I saw Bríd in the conservatory, chatting to Mrs. Connolly over a cup of tea. If I were Bríd I would have been embarrassed to see me, knowing that she guided people around my old home. But she didn’t seem embarrassed—a little shy, perhaps, but not embarrassed. Was it because Dulough looked so like a museum that she couldn’t imagine we’d ever really lived here? Or because she thought we should never have been living here in the first place?
I marveled again at our son, at how he realized long before I did the effect the move would have on him. My husband cleverly managed to keep his study. None of the rest of us had the luxury of a room to ourselves. I deserved the ballroom.
When I’d finished, there was no dust left. I had even wiped the fireplaces with a wet cloth. The marble could have been assembled yesterday—its corners were so sharp, its grain so shiny. I ran my finger along the mantelpiece; I needed to find things to put up there, to make the place more welcoming. Some things from Kate’s room, perhaps.
I blew up the mattress, the one John and I used on our honeymoon in Italy, when we camped north of Rome. I thought it was because he found camping romantic—and it was—but I realized later that there was probably no money for a hotel. I covered the mattress with layer upon layer of blankets; I remembered how uncomfortable it was, not that I’d cared on our honeymoon. Then I put two upturned cardboard boxes on each side of the bed and covered them with tea towels. At the foot, the chest from Philip’s old room, the one he used to keep his toys in. I’d found it the previous night, cast out by the government men who’d obviously thought it too shabby to have in the house anymore. All I needed was a desk. I went down the stairs and listened at the door to the landing.
I took a writing desk and its little chair from a bedroom that hadn’t been used since we had all our friends to stay, a back bedroom with nothing to distinguish it except that it was Philip’s favorite hiding place. He fitted inside the corner of the wardrobe completely, so that even when we opened the door, he could squash himself into one end without being seen. The first time he did it, we looked for him for fifteen or twenty minutes. It seemed a very long time and I tried to hide my panic. After he died, a part of me believed Philip was hiding in that wardrobe. I still can’t shake the notion that he’s playing a long game of hide-and-seek, that he’s hiding somewhere new, and all we have to do is find him.
I hadn’t much trouble with the desk; it was small, a Victorian lady’s travel desk with folding legs. I carried it under one arm up the stairs, and then I went back for the chair.
When I got to the top I put them down next to the big windows and began a letter to him, my husband, who has never understood anything.
I leave the following Monday morning. Kate has only been at school a week. John has only been home a few days, his efforts to avoid me almost comical. I get into the car before six o’clock in the morning, in the knickers I’ve slept in, my teeth unbrushed, my hair wanting a comb. I roar down the avenue, knowing that the minibuses won’t be there for hours. There’s a tractor out on the main road. I could kill him he’s going so slowly. When he turns into a field, I put my foot down for the Donegal bypass and the road to Dublin.
As I drive, the last scene I read in Olivia’s diary plays in my mind: She’s in the bath, wondering still whether Geoffrey’s going to leave, whether she should ask him outright. There’s a knock at the door, Áine with more water. But it’s him. He doesn’t ask if he can come in and he doesn’t look at her until he’s sitting on the three-legged stool near the taps, the one we still have in there now. He takes out his sketch pad and rests it on his crossed knees. He has a white tin cup with him and she realizes with relief that it is not a drink; it’s full of charcoal. His fingers are stained, he has been drawing elsewhere in the house. Olivia wonders what made him stop and come to find her, how he knew she was here. She is aware of her breasts breaking the surface of the water and she wonders whether her hair, gray now and slick against her head, is unattractive to him. She lifts a hand to fix it. Don’t move, he says quietly. So she closes her eyes and keeps her body still, listening to the scratch of charcoal on paper.
I stop in Enniskillen, at the playground that is the almost precise midpoint in the journey between our part of Donegal and Dublin. Last summer, Philip left his shoes behind in the car pa
rk. He took them off before settling in for the rest of the drive home and forgot to pull them back inside. I blamed Kate for distracting him, but it was my fault for not checking.
The school is more cheerful than I remember; there are lots of students around now, huddled in groups, moving between buildings, running up the path that leads to the sports fields. I have Kate’s timetable in the glove compartment. Elevenish on a Monday, the beginning of her history lesson. It’s easy to find the classroom. There are only three buildings and each is clearly labeled. Putting my hand to my hair, I wish I’d thought to look in the mirror before getting out of the car. I peer through the thick, institutional glass in the door and knock. The teacher turns from the board, surprised.
“I’m Kate’s mum.” I see her sitting in the middle of the room, my daughter, in her uniform, her hair pulled neatly back into a ponytail, and it strikes me how different she is already, after only a week. “Hello, darling.” Her eyes are wide, her mouth parted. She glances down at her desk and goes to close her textbook, then changes her mind and leaves it open, looking to her teacher for direction.
“Katherine, you’d better…”
A girl next to her is packing up Kate’s things, as if she is the only person who understands why I’m here. She hands Kate her bag and tries to catch her eye, but my daughter won’t lift her head. It was unthinking of me to have chosen a classroom; I should have found her at lunch or in her dormitory. But there isn’t anything to be done about that now. I put my arm around her shoulders and take her bag from her as we walk out the door.
She sits quietly on her bed while I put her clothes in the suitcase. The other side of the cubicle is plastered with photos, but Kate has left her own walls bare, confirmation surely that she never really wanted to be here. She doesn’t help me pack until I open the top drawer of her bedside table. “I’ll do that,” she says, as she sweeps the contents quickly into her knapsack, making me wonder what sort of grown-up secrets she has learnt so quickly to harbor.
