by Liz Nugent
Half an hour later, nobody else had arrived and our friend Amy began to look embarrassed and uncomfortable. We sat on the edge of the pond, trailing our bare feet in the water.
‘Where are they? Why didn’t they come? Didn’t they want to?’ said Diana.
Amy shook her head and bit her lip. She looked like she was about to cry. It was clear she knew something. Diana grabbed her arm and twisted it behind her back. ‘What is it? Why aren’t they here? Is it because of Mummy?’ She whispered it menacingly into Amy’s face.
I didn’t understand what Diana meant.
‘It … it’s because of your mother being … a loose woman,’ Amy said.
‘That’s not our fault,’ said Diana.
‘What do you mean?’ We had stopped mentioning Mummy a long time ago.
Amy said that the other parents thought that we might be a bad influence, but that her father, Dr Malone, had said that it would be cruel to punish us for something our mother had done.
I realized now that it wasn’t Daddy who had forbidden us to go to other children’s parties. We hadn’t been invited to them. I remembered how our classmates were often distant with us, though Diana and I were always so thrown together that I did not notice it as much as I might have, had we not been twins. I was shocked. Diana looked at me as if I was stupid.
‘Stop crying, you idiot. You’ll probably do the same thing yourself when we’re grown up. Everyone says you’re just like her. You’re not like Daddy and I. You’re common. You’re the one they’re afraid of. Not me!’
‘I am not common.’
‘Yes you are, Daddy can’t even look at you. You’re the exact same.’
It seemed like the most natural thing in the world to push Diana back into the pond. I didn’t snap. I was perfectly calm. I simply didn’t want her to say those things. She was being so unfair. I heard a crack as she smacked her head under the water, and when she struggled to surface, I sat on her chest to stop her. Right in that moment, I wanted Diana to drown. I wanted Diana to drown because if she was dead, she could never say those things again. Amy’s nervous laughter turned to tears.
‘Please let her up, Lydia, please. She’ll drown!’
I didn’t care. Amy became hysterical and ran off to get my father, who had disappeared into the greenhouses with his guests, no doubt to show them his melon-growing experiment. I was saturated now, as Diana thrashed around in the water beneath me, and soon she stopped struggling and became still. She had learned her lesson.
‘That’s better,’ I said, as I stepped out of the pond and pulled her up by the arm, but Diana crashed back into the water when I let her go and I was confused. I had wished really hard for Diana to be dead in that moment, but I hadn’t really meant it. She was going to be furious with me, and I would be in trouble for ruining the party. Daddy would be livid about our ruined dresses, covered with frogspawn and moss.
I pulled her up again, by the shoulders this time, but she wouldn’t lift her head and then I saw the blood seeping down the back of her neck. Daddy and his friends and Amy were running across the lawn and they were all shouting at me. Aunt Hilary ran indoors to get Hannah to telephone for an ambulance, and Daddy had pulled Diana out and laid her on the lawn, but she still wasn’t moving. He clamped her mouth open, but it was full of pondweed and he pulled it out in one long string of mess and saliva. He turned her upside down and held her up by her feet with one hand. Her dress fell down and everyone could see her knickers and I was shocked. Daddy thumped her on the back with his free hand. Daddy was crying and so was Amy and Daddy’s friends, the Percys.
All the time I was thinking, ‘What is wrong with everyone? She’ll be fine.’ I waited for her to shout at me and complain to Daddy about how awful I was. I knew it would take her a very long time to forgive me this time. But she still wasn’t moving. Had I gone too far?
Everything changed. The upheaval was far greater than after Mummy went away. I never returned to school. That night, while everyone was at the hospital, Hannah packed a trunk for me. Aunt Hilary told me Daddy had instructed her to take me to her home in Wicklow. I wanted to wait for Daddy and Diana to come home, but Aunt Hilary would brook no argument. I didn’t want to go, but not even Hannah would look at me as Aunt Hilary carried me into the car while I kicked and screamed. I did not speak for a week. I desperately missed Diana and Daddy and couldn’t understand why I could not return home.
Aunt Hilary lived with a friend – a thin woman with bony fingers and long loose grey hair, Miss Eliot. She was a retired schoolteacher and agreed to give me daily lessons. Early in that first week, I determined to eavesdrop on their conversation. I lay on the landing with my nightgown drawn down over my feet and my ear to the floor. It was clear from what they said that Miss Eliot, unlike my Aunt Hilary, was at least prepared to give me a chance.
‘She’s just a child,’ said my tutor. ‘She has no idea what she has done, she’s too young to realize.’
‘There’s just something about her. How could she do it? I can’t wait for Robert to take her back. I can’t keep her for ever.’
‘He needs time, Hilary. First Michelle abandoning him and the girls, and now this? He has to keep her out of the way to contain another scandal. Nobody knows that the girls were fighting at the time. As long as everyone thinks Diana just tripped and fell in, it will be dismissed as a terrible domestic accident.’
‘In barely three feet of water? But that Malone girl, Amy, she said that Lydia sat on her in the water. That sounds deliberate. It’s not something that should be ignored.’
‘Children say all sorts of fanciful things. And people drown in shallow water all the time. Anyway, Robert said Amy’s father is a good sort. All the other parents had boycotted the party because of Michelle. He was the only one to send his child to the party in the first place.’
‘I’ll bet he regrets it now. Oh Lord,’ said Aunt Hilary, ‘it’s too, too awful.’
‘I know, but we must do what we can to help. That child upstairs will be scarred for life, we must make her realize that it wasn’t her fault.’
Aunt Hilary made a snorting noise, but Miss Eliot said, ‘You can’t seriously blame her, she’s a child!’
It dawned on me then that I had killed my best friend, my worst enemy, my twin sister.
At the end of that first week, Miss Eliot explained that my sister had died but reassured me that it was an accident, nobody’s fault, and that it was an unavoidable tragedy. Dry-eyed, I asked her how it had happened. She turned her head to one side and fixed me with a look.
‘Don’t you remember? You and Diana were … playing in the pond?’
‘Yes?’
‘And Diana banged her head. Do you remember?’
‘Yes.’
I wrote Daddy lots of letters to say that I was very sad and missed him and Diana. I begged him to come and visit me or bring me home. He did not reply. Miss Eliot said he was very busy and there were fuel shortages because of The Emergency and nobody was allowed to drive. I suggested he could have cycled, but Miss Eliot said I was being silly.
I saw Aunt Hilary at dinner times. She would watch me warily and correct my table manners. At bedtime she would come to my room and ensure that I had said my prayers and asked for God’s forgiveness. I said my prayers with gusto, although I could hardly believe any longer in a God who would allow my mother to run away or let me kill my own sister. Aunt Hilary remained distant with me, but I determined to give her no cause for complaint whatsoever. Even at the height of summer, the small house was cold. As autumn turned to winter, it was absolutely freezing. Its setting was idyllic, but we lived in the permanent shadow of a mountain. We stayed in the kitchen as much as possible, where the range was located. Food was being rationed, and awful, disgusting things appeared on our dinner plates, but I ate every morsel without so much as a grimace. I remembered my manners and never raised my voice or stamped my foot. I tried to be ladylike at all times. Just like Diana.
Christmas came and
went without a visit or a note from my father. Aunt Hilary and Miss Eliot tried to be jolly with me, but the forced merriment was transparent as water.
By the time I returned to Dublin after ten months, I was fizzing with excitement and had quite forgotten that things could never be the same. I travelled in a jaunting car with Miss Eliot, who left me at the door with my trunk. ‘What a fine house,’ she said. ‘I had no idea.’ Everyone said that when they first saw Avalon. We said our goodbyes and I promised to write. ‘Everything will be all right, little one. You are not a bad girl.’
There was only one bed now in our bedroom, and the wardrobes contained just one set of clothing, most of which had become too small for me. Hannah had been replaced by Joan, a good deal younger but almost mute. Diana was missing. And whereas, at Aunt Hilary’s, I had missed her sorely like an inexplicable sadness, on my return it felt like an amputation. I ran through the house, up and down the stairs, looking for signs of life. I went to the hole in the wall behind the writing desk under our bedroom window and retrieved the scarlet lipstick that I had hidden there since my mother’s departure. Diana had laughed at me for keeping it, but I had found it under the skirting board in Daddy’s room, and for the first year after she left, it still smelled vaguely of her perfume. I sniffed it now, but the scent was gone.
Downstairs, I stopped short at the kitchen window and noted that the pond had been drained and filled with soil. The silence ate into my bones and I went to the piano and played and played until I heard Daddy’s footsteps in the hall.
I ran full pelt at him and grabbed him around his waist, pushing my head into his upper stomach, trying to reach his heart. At first, he held his hands outwards, not wishing to touch me, but I would not release him and then I felt the warmth of his large hand on my skull and his other hand slowly enveloped my shoulder. He pulled my face upwards and looked into my eyes. ‘We must start again, you and I. We are all we have.’
It was easier not to talk about Diana after that, though she smiled at us from the framed photographs on the mantelpiece.
A new home tutor was appointed and Daddy chose all the subjects that I should study: Latin, music, art, literature, sewing and such like. I worked very hard and excelled at everything. Daddy said my posture needed attention and a ballet instructor was brought to the house, a tiny French woman. We had plenty of space, so a barre was installed upstairs, and there, in the newly named dance room, I jetéed and pliéed and walked en pointe until my toes bled. I loved Madame Guillem. She treated me like her own child, although she never mentioned whether she had children. She took me under her wing and explained everything when my body began to change. She told me that I should be mixing with girls my own age, but I didn’t want to. Madame Guillem told Daddy that I was the best student she had ever taught. When I was sixteen years old, she suggested that I apply to the Sadler’s Wells Ballet School in London. I was horrified and terrified at the thought of being sent away again. Daddy thought it would be a good idea, but by then I had begun to notice the way he sometimes looked at Madame Guillem, and I didn’t like it. One day, I saw him help her to put her coat on and he held on to her arm the way he used to with Mummy. She smiled up into his face. Was she planning to get me out of the way? I have learned that you can never trust anyone. I gave up eating until the idea of ballet school was abandoned and Madame Guillem had been dismissed. I still practised to stay toned and supple. There was a mirrored wall behind the barre upstairs, and I liked to think that the girl in the mirror was Diana and that this time we were identical twins, dancing a duet.
Many years later, when I met Andrew and he enquired about the girl sitting beside me in the old photographs, Daddy explained that my sister Diana had drowned tragically when we were children, and abruptly changed the subject. When Andrew and I became more intimate, he questioned me about the incident and I lied and said it had happened on a day at the beach. He hugged me tightly to console me on my loss.
I became pregnant with Laurence over three years after our marriage. Andrew and I were so happy when I finally conceived, and Daddy opened a bottle of vintage wine to celebrate the news when I told him.
‘About time,’ he said.
I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, having no sister or mother to advise me. My sister-in-law, Rosie, the queen of fecundity, descended upon me with advice and booklets and potions and lotions, but I preferred to work things out for myself. The pregnancy was uncomfortable and exhausting, and childbirth was excruciating, but when the midwife placed my newborn child at my breast, I felt complete for the first time since Diana’s death. Laurence being born on Christmas Day was fate intervening. My most treasured gift. I adored my little boy. He was mine. Andrew left us to our own devices, certainly for the first few months, but I wept when he was ten months old and Andrew insisted that we move the cot into the bedroom next door to us, which had been carefully prepared as a nursery. ‘We must have our own room back.’ Daddy agreed with Andrew, and the matter ended there.
In the summer time, I would bring Laurence’s pram outside. It soothed him when he was teething to be outdoors. He would stop crying then. I would lie on a rug on the lawn beside the pram and listen to his soft gurgling, feeling like I didn’t deserve such happiness.
When Laurence was nearly a year old, Daddy died, on the same day as John F. Kennedy. He had been sick with cancer for many months. Still, Daddy’s death shocked me as much as the American president’s. Andrew was of course sympathetic, but I had lost Mummy, Diana and Daddy, and now I clung to Laurence, the only one left of my blood.
I wanted to home-school Laurence, but Andrew put his foot down again, arguing that our son needed to be socialized. I kept him home as long as I could, so that when Laurence did eventually start school, he was one of the oldest boys in his class. That first week, I stayed outside the school every day, trying to spot him through the classroom window. Other mothers tried to inveigle me into conversation when the school bell rang, but I didn’t want to talk to anybody except my cherub. I swooped him up into my arms and carried him all the way home.
Gradually, Laurence began to talk about other children and his teachers, and I felt the first pangs of jealousy. As he grew into an independent little boy, I got used to it, but the deep bond we had shared was fading. Shortly after his seventh birthday, Laurence refused to sit in my lap any more, encouraged by Andrew. ‘You are far too attached to that boy. Let him off.’ We had been trying for another baby. I told Andrew that I wanted to have five children. He baulked at five but thought a sibling or two would be good for Laurence. We tried, and failed, and failed, and failed, and continued to fail. Laurence was to be my only child.
Forty years after Diana’s death, I echoed my father’s words to my son. ‘We must start again, you and I. We are all we have.’ The poor boy has had so much to deal with, and he has handled it all with such consideration and discretion. And he has done it all for me.
The months following my confinement after Andrew’s death were strange times. I let Laurence take charge of everything. It took quite some time for me to realize that we had no money. Laurence went to deal with the bank manager and the solicitors. I wasn’t able for it. The news was grim. Andrew had at some stage mortgaged Avalon to make investments with Paddy Carey. Although thankfully Andrew’s death meant that the mortgage was redeemed, there really was very little left over. Carey had told Andrew that he was investing his money in a gilt-edged fund, but it turned out that he had been siphoning it off into his own pet projects, hoping in vain for a hit to cover his losses. Because Andrew had been a judge for only three years, his state pension was small, and the portion of it that I was entitled to as his widow was even smaller. The payments that Andrew had made into a private pension plan and life insurance over twenty years had been gambled away by Paddy Carey. There was a delay with Andrew’s will going through probate, because Andrew had been in the process of suing Carey when he died. The solicitor had told Laurence that suing Carey would be a futile exercise. He’d tri
ed to persuade Andrew not to bother. Carey himself had gambled with the stolen money and was now rumoured to be destitute somewhere on the west coast of America.
I really couldn’t process all this information at the time. My medication dosage was quite high. I told Laurence that he would have to ask Andrew’s mother, Eleanor, for money. She would have to keep us. But when he approached her, she almost went into shock because it turned out that Andrew had been supporting her for the previous years also. He had persuaded her to sell her three-storey four-bedroom Victorian redbrick on the Merrion Road and buy a cottage in Killiney. Andrew had promised her he was making good investments on her behalf. She had no idea that he had lost it all. At the time, he had told me that his mother was getting too old to manage a big house, and at the back of my mind I had thought that our money worries would be over when Eleanor died, because she had to be sitting on a large pile of cash. At the beginning of our financial woes, I had urged Andrew to go to Eleanor and borrow from her. I had thought he was too proud. In fact, he knew she had nothing except her cottage because he had gambled it all. All Eleanor now had was her pension. Finn and Rosie sent us a few cheques, but they reminded us (as if they needed to) that they had eight children to feed and that we must find a way to support ourselves. They got together with Eleanor to suggest that she might sell her cottage and move in with us. We have six bedrooms and so couldn’t argue that we didn’t have the room, but I made it clear that I would not countenance the idea. Eleanor took umbrage. Finn advised Laurence that we must sell Avalon immediately to free up the equity, but we couldn’t do that: first, because it is the only home I have ever known, and second, because we could never take the risk of the new owners discovering what is buried beyond the kitchen window.
When Laurence eventually told me what he had discovered, I was astonished that he had put everything together in his head and come up with some correct answers. He knew the remains were Annie Doyle’s. He even showed me the tarnished bracelet he had pulled from the hoover bag and all the newspaper reports he had kept. The poor boy had worried himself to shreds over it. Laurence held his father entirely responsible but insisted that we should go to the guards, so that the girl’s family would finally have peace. He never suspected that I knew anything about it. He was so anxious telling me, he thought that the news would send me back to the psychiatric hospital. But I was a year out of it by then, and my wits had returned sufficiently. I feigned shock, horror and disbelief. I screamed and cried and grew hysterical. Fortunately, Laurence came to the conclusion that I would not be able for a scandal and the media attention that would follow. I suggested that he could move the body and leave it somewhere it could be discovered, but he convinced me that the horror of the job was too much for him and the risk of being caught too great. In fact, by then I liked having the girl in the pond – Diana had been buried in a plot in Deansgrange Cemetery, but I liked to imagine that she was right here in the old pond where I’d left her.