Black Lake

by Johanna Lane

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  For my parents

  …I regarded men as something much less than the buildings they made and inhabited, as mere lodgers and short-term sub-lessees of small importance in the long, fruitful life of their homes.

  —Charles Ryder,

  Brideshead Revisited

  Autumn

  Chapter 1

  When they were little, the door to what was to have been the house’s ballroom remained locked. They would stand at the threshold, rattling the handle, first the girl, then the boy, turning it left and right, feeling a split second of give, a moment of hope that this time it might open, but it never did. Their father said that the key was lost, that the room was never finished, that no one had been up there since the house was built. But that was a lie.

  When the girl was twelve, her mother plucked her out of boarding school in the city and brought her home. At the door to the ballroom, she slipped a key out of her pocket; the girl’s breath caught when it turned easily in the lock. In the vast, secret space, their furniture was doll’s house furniture. The mother unpacked the girl’s suitcase into a trunk at the foot of the bed, which was covered in a thick eiderdown. She had stolen it from the room below, the room she had shared with the girl’s father until the government took over the house and they moved to the small cottage down by the lake.

  There was a knock at the door. The girl went to the bottom of the stairs and listened. Her father was on the other side. He whispered her name.

  “Dad?”

  “Is Mum there?”

  The mother arrived, as if she’d glided across the floor. “What is it?”

  “What are you doing?” the father asked.

  The mother didn’t answer.

  That night, the mother fell asleep long before the girl. She had driven to the city and back in one day, a ten-hour round-trip. The girl watched her sleep, her lips twitching at the corners every so often as if she were talking to someone in her dreams. There was no electricity in the ballroom, only candles, and though the one next to the bed still burnt, it gave out little light. It was such a contrast to the packed dorms of the boarding school that the girl couldn’t help but be afraid. As she lay there, her eyes wandered the darkness, where ghosts of her ancestors could materialize at any moment.

  But the next morning was bright and clear. From their warm bed, the girl watched the sun arrive over the sea. The wind was already in the gardens, the tops of the trees bent as if they were straining to talk to each other and straining to hear. The island just beyond the shore was dark, sodden. It had rained during the night.

  That first morning, as the mother slept on, curled up, knees to chin, the girl wondered whether her father would take her for a walk—to look for the deer, perhaps, or to climb up to their favorite place in the hills. She had been at boarding school only a week before her mother took her back. It had been her first time away from home. At night, she had thought about the house, about her old bedroom, about the kitchen, about the gardens, and about the island. Now she understood what “missing” meant.

  The tray that was put outside their door half an hour later was the first of many. And, by the end of breakfast, without anything having been said, the girl knew she wasn’t going to be allowed downstairs that day. But she couldn’t have known that it would be almost a month before she would leave the ballroom at all.

  After breakfast, the mother produced a history book, the exact same one the girl had been using at school. They lay on the bed, the sun leaking in the windows. The girl was reading aloud, but she soon sensed that her mother wasn’t listening. Before, the girl would have made up something funny, some sort of gobbledegook, so that when her mother realized, she’d laugh and tickle her and make her start again. But the girl knew not to do that sort of thing anymore.

  They did an hour of history. Then, at the girl’s insistence, an hour of Irish.

  When their lunch arrived, the mother realized that they had no proper table. They’d had their breakfast in bed, but lunch was not a meal to be had in bed, let alone dinner. She could see that the mother was angry with herself for not thinking of this before. “But look,” the girl said, and laid out a place mat on each side of the bed, then a knife, a fork, and a napkin. “Clever girl,” said the mother, smiling.

  When the lunch things had been cleared from outside the door, the mother declared that they needed exercise. They waltzed around and around until the girl was panting more than she had in hockey practice. The floorboards creaked underneath their feet and she imagined falling through to her parents’ old room while the guide was in the middle of a tour. She could hear people murmuring below; what would they make of the noises above?

  That was the first day. On the second, the father came to the door again, early.

  “Is Mum asleep?”

  “Yes,” the girl whispered back.

  “Can you see the key anywhere?”

  “It’s under her pillow. Haven’t you got another?”

  “I’m afraid not.” An intake of breath. “Don’t worry, I’m sure she’ll be better soon.”

  “Will I have to go back to school then?”

  “Don’t you want to?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered truthfully.

  The girl had wanted to go to boarding school. She was tired of having no friends her own age, of having nothing to do, of the endless sea, and of the way her mother had grown strange. But school was all opposites: Where she had had space, now she was confined, where she had sleep, now she woke at the crack of dawn, where she had no friends, now there were too many girls, too much talk.

  When the mother came to the girl’s history class a few days earlier, her eyes seeking her daughter’s, the girl had rejoiced. An afternoon away, perhaps with her grandparents; would they let her curl up and sleep? But the girl and the mother had lunch at a restaurant in town, just the two of them, and after, the mother had swung the car north, away from school, towards the country, towards home. The girl hadn’t dared to ask how long she would be back for—or why.

  At the beginning, she wasn’t afraid in the ballroom. Until the summer, they had been taught at home, mostly by the mother but sometimes, always more interestingly, by the father. The girl was used to settling down to some geography or history or French after breakfast. The mother would leave them work by their cereal bowls and disappear into the gardens, with a promise that she’d return mid-morning.

  But soon the days began to run into each other; there was nothing to mark them as different from the ones that went before. They slept, they washed, they ate the meals the housekeeper prepared for them. Boarding school had already accustomed the girl to very little privacy, but using the chamber pot was something she never got used to, though the mother retreated gracefully to the other end of the room when the girl went behind the screen. She learnt to do the same and took solace in the fact that it was removed from outside the door late at night, which suggested that it was the father and not the housekeeper who performed this task.

  The girl remembers when the snow began, flakes settling into the windowpanes, muffling everything outside, even the wind. The tourists were gone by then and it was just the sound of her father and the housekeeper moving about below, shutting up th
e house, covering the beds in dust sheets, rolling up the rugs, storing away quilts no one ever slept under. The girl missed the sound of the visitors, the guide herding them from room to room, story to story. Surely, when the house was finally locked for winter, the father would say that they had to leave, too?

  It was after the snow that the mother began to talk about the girl’s brother as if he were still with them. One morning, as the girl did her lessons, her mother said, “I’d like you two to have this finished by lunch.”

  The girl’s heart jumped. But it was a tiny word, two—a slip of the tongue, perhaps.

  Then, a couple of afternoons later, the mother said, as she absentmindedly leafed through a textbook, “Can one of you tell me whether we’ve done this already?”

  From that day onward, the brother joined them for morning classes. He never slept with them, he didn’t need the warm water to wash his face in the mornings, he’d no use for the chamber pot, but he was always there for lessons. And the girl came to accept his presence. Or rather, she came to accept that the mother felt him beside them as she stumbled through a sum or conjugated avoir and être. He was never expected to do any written work, to produce anything, and the mother never asked him a direct question, but sometimes, when she asked, “What’s the capital of Peru?” or “What’s the population of Ireland?” the girl would study the mother’s face intently in the silence before she answered, to see whether the mother was listening to him, whether she could hear a faint “Lima” or “The whole of Ireland or just the Republic?” surfacing, drifting in through the window, muffled by the waves.

  After the move, the family had lived off a cold roast for days. Her brother had been angry at the chunks of meat that appeared everywhere, in sandwiches, in gravy, or simply, unashamedly cold, with potatoes and carrots, night after night. Now the girl regretted laughing at him when he’d taken a bite and run to the bin to spit it out. He’d opened the desolate fridge and stared into it for a while, as if better food might magically appear if he just stood there long enough. She should have found him something else to eat.

  One day, as the snow drifted across the windowpanes, the mother flipped through “Rivers” until she got to “Glaciers.”

  “I’ve done that,” the girl said gently, careful to say “I” instead of “we.”

  “But you didn’t do it properly, did you?”

  The girl looked at her, confused.

  “You were too busy swimming this morning, isn’t that right? You traced your drawing from the book instead of doing what I asked you to do. Your younger brother”—she held up the picture he’d done at the time, which must have been tucked into the pages of the textbook—“did it properly.”

  The mother was replaying something that had happened almost half a year earlier, the morning after they’d moved out of the big house.

  That evening, when the father came to the door, the girl wanted to tell him that she couldn’t stay up in the ballroom much longer, that she was ready, now, to go back to school. Perhaps he heard something in her voice, because for the first time he asked if she was all right. What could she say other than yes, forcing herself to sound as if she meant it, as she looked up at her mother standing right there beside her?

  One freezing morning, the mother stopped getting out of bed. She turned away, cocooning the duvet more tightly around them, when they heard the housekeeper leave the hot water outside the door.

  The girl had become used to the modulation of the father’s knocks, usually a soft tap designed not to upset the mother, but sometimes more urgent if he wanted to ask her a question. On this day, when they hadn’t eaten their breakfast, then their lunch, he tried calling through the door, first the mother’s name, then the girl’s. The girl wanted to respond but didn’t believe her voice would reach; she felt weak, as if her mother was passing her lethargy on as they lay there. His knocks were loud and firm. One, then another, then again and again. The girl went to the door.

  “Enough,” was all he said.

  Yes, the girl thought, enough.

  “Can she come to the door?” he asked.

  The girl went over to the mother’s form, curled like a question mark under the quilt.

  “Dad says, ‘Enough.’”

  The mother stirred. “What?”

  The girl repeated the word.

  A hum came from the mother, a low hum, like some of the boys in the girl’s class did to annoy the teacher, but then the mother’s hum turned into something else, something louder, which turned into a sob, and then another and another, until she was gulping in great lungfuls of breath.

  The girl ran to the door.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s Mum.”

  She didn’t wait for his answer but went to the bed and curled herself around her mother’s back to try to make her stop.

  At first, the girl thought he had done what she expected him to do, which was to take away their uneaten lunch, as he had their untouched breakfast. Some minutes passed before she heard the first crash, a crash that sent her knees suddenly into the mother’s back so that she shot forwards, her body straightening, her head jerking from the pillow. Someone, it must have been the father—although it seemed impossible to the girl that he was capable of it—was breaking the crockery from their uneaten meal off the door. She could decipher the sharp smash of china and the dull thud of food—an apple, perhaps; then liquid: milk, coffee, soup. And then a more shocking noise, someone crying. A someone she knew was him.

  When he had gone, she remained in bed with the mother, long past the point it gave the girl any comfort. It dawned on her that they had been playing a sort of game, a game that had been designed by the mother, yes, but a game that the father had agreed to play, too. That afternoon it became clear that he didn’t want to play anymore but didn’t know how to stop.

  The following morning, the girl managed to get her mother as far as the windows. They watched the wind whip up the waves around the island. The snow had gone, as if it was determined to leave in time for Christmas, as if it was needed elsewhere. The lawn underneath looked damp and sickly.

  Someone new came to the door. It was the girl’s grandmother, from the city. The mother rose slowly at the sound of her own mother’s voice. She approached the door on unsteady legs, and though the girl tried to hear, she couldn’t catch everything that the older woman whispered. The mother came back to bed. It was the first time the girl’s grandparents had visited since the tourists came, and the girl wondered where they would sleep. There was no space in the cottage for them. Would an exception be made—would they sleep in the house below, in a show bed, under a show bedspread, even though it all belonged to the government now? She imagined her grandparents in their pajamas, returning from the bathroom, having to step over the blue velvet ropes that kept the visitors to one side of the room.

  That evening, they ate for the first time in two days and the girl understood it was the bargain that had been struck between her mother and her grandmother. There were tiny envelopes next to their dinner plates, each neatly labeled with their names. The mother opened both. “Vitamins,” she muttered under her breath, and handed the girl’s to her.

  “Why?”

  “Your grandmother’s very health-conscious.”

  The girl tried to swallow it with her milk but it was too big and it got caught in her throat. For a moment, she struggled for air. The mother put her hand under the girl’s mouth and clapped her on the back, hard. The girl spat out the pill.

  “Jee-sus,” the mother said.

  “I’m sorry, Mum.”

  She looked her daughter in the eyes, more intently than she’d done in months, and said, “Oh, darling, I didn’t mean you. I meant I was angry with my mum.”

  That the girl’s grown-up mother could be angry with her more grown-up mother was a revelation.

  When it became obvious that the mother wasn’t going to come down on her own and that the father didn’t have it in him to do what he should, s
omeone—one of the government people, perhaps—phoned the police.

  There were so many feet on the stairs that morning that the girl wondered if it was a special winter tour group. When they approached the door to the ballroom, the mother picked up the girl’s hand and hid it in her own.

  “The guards are here.” The father barely got the words out before a soft local voice called through the door.

  “I need to speak to”—the guard paused to confirm the girl’s name—“Katherine, please, Mrs. Campbell.”

  The mother sat completely still, her eyes willing the girl to do the same. The girl could feel the heavy weight of the guards’ presence; surely the mother would have to give in now?

  “I’m obliged to tell you that what you’re doing is against the law.” It was a man now, harder-voiced.

  The mother was still, listening, her head tilted back in defiance.

  “I’m all right,” the girl called out.

  No one answered.

  “Am I to understand that it is not your intention to come out, Mrs. Campbell?” he said.

  The mother gripped the girl’s hand more tightly.

  For a while, there was silence outside the door again. The father went to his study to have a last look for a second key; even as he did this he would have known he was stalling. There had only ever been one. It had been in his safe, a safe he thought his wife hadn’t known about. When he finally returned to announce that his search had been fruitless, he was very grateful that the house was closed for the winter—that there were no tourists to witness what happened next.

  This is the girl’s last memory of her mother before she was taken back to Dublin to get better:

  They haven’t moved from the bed. The mother has her arms around the girl, covering her ears, muffling the sound of the others’ approach. A drill outside, five short bursts, screws falling to the floor. And a sixth, longer this time, the old hinges unwilling to break. The girl wonders if the house is protecting them.