The Temple House Vanishing

by Rachel Donohue

  And when I did so Mr Lavelle looked up. He was sitting in a leather armchair and at his feet sat Helen. And she didn’t look sour as she turned her head to me, but instead passionate and majestic. Her dark red hair, alluring and abundant in the firelight, and her black, full skirt fanned out on the floor around her.

  And something about him made me think of the Jesus in my children’s Bible. A ray of sharp, white and gold light. Like he might blind you with the possibility of miracles.

  And they both smiled at me, as if it was the most natural thing ever. To be there, together and alone.

  As I backed out of the door, I thought I heard him calling my name.

  The Journalist

  Chapter Nineteen

  Victoria’s office was at the top of the building. The view was mostly sky, and it was dark now. The city lay below, lit up, bright orange and red. It was vibrant, fast and busy there. Alive. But where we stood there was nothing but silence. A monochrome cocoon of reinforced glass, a sleek long desk and a computer.

  Victoria had finished her talk and walked me to her office. We didn’t speak. She was wearing a black dress and around her neck a string of pearls. She fiddled with them as we stood in the crowded lift and avoided looking at me. After we got out, people in the corridor outside thanked her for the talk and looked forward to speaking to her later. She smiled and shook hands, a look of studied politeness on her face, taking business cards as they were offered to her. The graduate group turned away before her office and disappeared up a narrow staircase where the party on the roof was to be held.

  Victoria lit a low lamp on her desk, gestured to the couch and went to a coffee machine in the corner and remained standing there with her back to me. There were no pictures on the wall of her office, nor on the desk. There were some large storage boxes in the corner of the room and it occurred to me she might be moving, leaving. The coffee table in front of the couch had business magazines, some newspapers and the carving of a woman’s head. It looked African in style, shiny and black. I laid my bag down on the floor and took out my notebook as the coffee machine whirred into action. Then I thought maybe the sight of a notebook might put her off so I stored it away just before she walked towards me with a cup of coffee in her hand. She laid it on the table and sat down opposite me.

  ‘You have been writing to me,’ she said, ‘about Louisa.’

  I felt her voice catch slightly as she said the name and she looked down at her fingernails for a second. They were long, tapered and painted a dark red. There were no rings on her hands. There was a weariness in her body language. She looked like she needed to sleep, curl up and close her eyes. I had not expected this after Helen’s rigid tension and air of menace. Nor indeed Victoria’s own performance in front of the crowd earlier, where she had been strident, even amusing at times.

  There was something tragic, haunted about her; it was there in the shadows under her eyes and the stiffness of her body.

  I began by explaining why I was doing this, as I had done with Helen, though I was careful this time not to suggest anything too intimate in my desire for knowledge, nor any pity. These women didn’t do pity. I did speak of having grown up near Louisa, of being always vaguely aware of her story.

  She watched me closely when I said this, scanning my face. There was no looking over my shoulder or attempting to derail me with raised eyebrows or incredulous glances. Several times, though, she turned her neck from side to side, as if she might have a crick or pain in it. In another life I might have been doing a feature with her on the stress of modern life for women with high-flying careers. She was darker, though. I knew that, somehow.

  When I stopped speaking she didn’t say anything. She stayed looking at me, her eyes pale and shining in the low light, but I sensed her mind was elsewhere. There was a vacancy to her. The air in the room felt heavy around us. I heard a clock ticking. She turned her head suddenly, as if she heard something behind her. When she faced me again, she held her hand to her throat and stroked it slightly.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I asked as the silence between us became more awkward.

  I tried to begin a conversation – ‘I’m sorry, I know it must be. . .’ – but then I paused, not wanting to tread too far, too quickly as I had done with Helen.

  I wanted to ask her straight up, what happened to Louisa? You have all the answers, or more of them than anyone else. But I didn’t say that, of course; there were rules to the dance. She demanded patience.

  Victoria got up abruptly and went to get water from a jug on her desk. She offered me some but I declined.

  ‘She haunts me,’ she said, sitting back down, and for a second she put her hands up to her face, rubbing her eyes, and her voice was slightly muffled.

  I nodded my head.

  ‘She haunts me too,’ I said. ‘The photos of them.’

  And the shadows on the street at home.

  ‘And the policeman, the detective who worked on the case, he can’t forget her either, and he’s retired now,’ I said. ‘So many lives are affected when someone disappears. Her story, it deserves to be told, more fully, more authentically than it has been.’

  I leaned forward towards her. If you were as close to her as all the reports said, you must respond to this, I thought.

  ‘I feel it at night. When I am here sometimes – I work late a lot – but it’s mostly when I am at home,’ she said, looking around the room.

  I wondered if she had heard me at all. I followed her gaze around the space.

  ‘Things happen; I see things, remember random moments. Out of nowhere, like I’m back there. I can smell it too, the wild garlic that grew in the woods in spring, and the grass when it had been cut in front of the house, and the smoke from the bonfires. The village that was a few miles away; sometimes in the evening around Halloween they would light the fires and we could smell it. Even in our bedrooms, the windows were so draughty, everything got in. Even the smoke,’ she said.

  She had stood up again as she finished speaking and walked to the window. Her back was straight.

  ‘Have you been to the school, visited it?’ she asked, turning back to me.

  I shook my head and told her I planned a trip there in the next few days.

  ‘You have to see it,’ she said. ‘You can’t understand anything really without seeing it. I can draw you a map, show you all the places to look, the things only we knew about,’ she said and walked to her desk. ‘Louisa told me she always loved books that had a map at the front of them. I had forgotten that.’

  She spoke more to herself than to me.

  ‘She thought it meant you would be entering another world, and you could follow the paths. I preferred when there were family trees at the start of a book, elaborate and complex. Like Tolstoy,’ she said and laughed briefly. ‘Everyone related in some way; it was always there. The clues, buried in the family tree,’ she said, shuffling some paper on her desk.

  I realized she was rambling, she must have been nervous. I longed to stretch for my notebook, but felt again that I should not.

  ‘Oh there’s no need to draw me a map, I have Google and everything I need. I mean, unless there is something in particular you think I should visit?’ I said.

  ‘When will you be going?’ she asked.

  ‘Probably early next week,’ I said.

  We looked at each other for a second, and something resembling understanding passed between us.

  She sat back down on the couch, preoccupied rather than defensive. I felt it was important that I kept her relaxed. Like when a deer emerges before you on a path in the forest; if you hold your breath, they might not run.

  ‘I saw your article,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, I have another one going in next week. It’s going to be more about Edward Lavelle this time. I have been rereading all the descriptions of him, and even found some people who studied with him, a friend of his named Xavier, willing to talk. It is getting quite a lot of interest from readers, the series.’


  She looked pained at the mention of his name and I was sorry I had said anything about reader interest. She would think I was just another journalist, looking for sensation, which, as I kept having to remind myself, I wasn’t.

  ‘I always thought I would write a book,’ she said, ‘one that would matter and mean something. Everyone thought it, back then.’

  I nodded and drank some coffee. It tasted sweet, foreign.

  ‘It’s funny really, or odd, I suppose, how things turn out,’ she said, twirling a piece of her hair around her fingers. ‘You wonder, what was the moment, the point that things tilted off, and you went another way. I would not have believed all this back then if you had told me,’ she said, surveying the room around us. ‘I did not seek any of this.’

  I looked around us, quiet power and status in every corner of the place. Was this not what you expected? Was this not what you were raised for?

  ‘Of course, I know, with my rational head on, it was the day Louisa didn’t come back. No one was the same after, how could we be? But sometimes I’m not sure, and I think maybe it started even before that,’ she said.

  She had that vacant, faraway look again.

  ‘What did they say about him, Mr Lavelle, the people you spoke to?’ she asked, suddenly more alert and leaning forward in her seat.

  ‘That he was this free spirit, a bit wild maybe but sort of unusual, and interesting, had this way of making people come out of themselves. They said he loved Temple House, really enjoyed teaching. But then I spoke to the detective and he talked about how people thought he had a dark side, kind of a fantasist, had an interest in women, much younger women. A desire for attention, adoration even.’ For some reason, once I’d said this to her, I felt embarrassed.

  She said nothing but stared slightly into space, distracted once more.

  ‘Was that how you remember him?’ I asked.

  ‘No, not really.’ Then, after a pause, she said, ‘But also yes. I mean he was different, he was younger than the other teachers. You know, he was sort of like the greatest politician you could ever meet. I’ve met a few in this job. They have a hollowness to them, like they are not fully three-dimensional, and he was like that. The appearance was all fine, but when you touched it, or tried to, there was nothing there. He would just evaporate. I imagine celebrities are the same – maybe that would be a better analogy. Have you ever met anyone like that?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. Well maybe, but not as extreme,’ I said. ‘Everyone holds a bit of themselves back.’

  ‘I find now they don’t much, don’t you? Look at those people here tonight – they will be opening their hearts to each other up there.’ She gestured to the roof. ‘They have so little mystery to them. They seem to have no secrets. They don’t even want to have any. We were different. He was different. There was more magic in not fully revealing.’

  She was wrong, of course; everyone had secrets. You realized that when you tried to interview them.

  ‘Did you try to get close to him, you and Louisa?’ I asked, holding my breath.

  She didn’t answer. Somewhere outside in the corridor there was more laughter and the sound of glasses being moved or carried. Then she looked at her watch.

  ‘I think perhaps, for a time, we thought we were,’ she said. ‘Close to him.’

  She leaned over the coffee table and started rearranging the magazines, and then wiped the surface with her hand, as if checking for dust.

  I complimented her on the sculpture of the woman’s head on the table.

  ‘I go to Africa every year or so,’ she said. ‘Morocco, mainly. I try and buy something, but mostly I keep them at home. I keep myself and the things that matter to me separate from here.’

  She looked briefly over to the boxes in the corner.

  ‘Do you remember the last night with Louisa?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m not sure now what are real memories and what is just my mind playing tricks,’ she said.

  ‘Did you ever believe they had run away together, or did you think something bad had happened?’ I asked.

  She sat more upright and I felt like her breathing became heavier, deeper.

  ‘I don’t know what happened. I thought I did, I thought they were going to leave but then, then I realized that wasn’t it at all. But by then it was too late,’ she said.

  They were going to leave? I sat more upright in the chair. A hint of truth, insight emerging.

  ‘Too late for what?’ I asked.

  She didn’t answer for a few seconds.

  ‘To explain, to make her understand. . .’ she said.

  I breathed in and folded my hands together, afraid they would give my urgent interest away. I was about to ask her more questions when she went on.

  ‘You know, I never sense him. Isn’t that odd? I was always waiting to see if there was anything, some sign, but there never was. I mean they went missing together, I saw both of them virtually every day, but it’s only her I can ever feel. She is the only one. . .’

  I remembered the detective said Victoria had a flair for the dramatic. But to me she seemed genuinely at loose ends, damaged. A loss so deep that no amount of time could heal. And there was regret, even guilt, somewhere at the heart of it all.

  ‘Was there something special, private, between the three of you?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know now, really; that’s the thing, isn’t it, especially when you are a teenager, you tend to think you are the centre of the universe. Like everything moves for you, but you have such little power really, or power that you can direct in any useful way,’ she said, seeming almost deliberately elusive.

  ‘Do you remember the intensity of it,’ she said, leaning forward slightly, ‘the burden of being that age, everything still new, and you had to pretend to be jaded and not affected by it? I wish now I could go back, go back and say don’t pretend, don’t be embarrassed by it. It’s only new once. What’s that poem, the “hardest hue to hold?”’

  I didn’t really know what she was talking about. I needed facts from her.

  ‘You were one of the last to see Louisa that night, before she disappeared in the village?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m not sure – possibly. But no, I wasn’t in the village,’ she said, falling back on the couch. ‘It’s all on file.’

  She sat up suddenly then, and it felt like she had woken out of a dream. She checked her watch again.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘I know it’s getting late and I really appreciate your time tonight.’

  She got up from the couch and walked back to the window.

  ‘Do you write every day about her?’ she asked me.

  She seemed interested, genuinely.

  I walked over to the window and stood beside her. Her face was reflected in the glass.

  ‘I write most days,’ I said.

  She sighed then, as if envious.

  ‘Do you feel like you are getting to know Louisa, him, both of them?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, in a small way; it’s kind of like cleaning an old painting or something, their faces start to emerge from behind the dust. Then other times I think it’s more like fossil hunting; you know, getting in the dirt and digging. You don’t know what it is you are looking for but you know it’s there, somewhere,’ I said, turning away from the window to look at her profile.

  Looking at her reflection, I thought that she must have once been beautiful, everything in equal proportion, but the light had drained away and just a pale ghost of it was left on her features.

  She turned to face me and was trembling slightly. She looked afraid, nervous.

  ‘And him, what do you think of him?’ she said.

  ‘He sounds,’ I began, then paused. ‘I can imagine he was quite fascinating, once.’

  She smiled then and shook her head gently. As if this was an old joke.

  ‘Thank you again, for meeting me,’ I said. ‘I won’t let you or Louisa down in the way I tell it. I want to give her back some dignity, that’s all.�
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  ‘It’s time,’ she said, looking away and back to the window. ‘It’s just time now. She’s been gone so long, losing patience.’

  I thought it was an odd thing to say. She had closed her eyes as she spoke.

  I started to walk to the door.

  ‘Can I give you something of hers?’ she said suddenly. ‘I kept some things she wrote, pictures and stuff, and I meant to give them to her parents, but never did. I’m packing everything up now.’ She indicated the boxes in the corner.

  I gave her my address. She said she would have them sent to me.

  ‘Are you leaving, moving somewhere?’ I asked.

  But she didn’t answer.

  ‘You are going next week, to the school?’ she said, walking towards me, her face in shadow.

  I nodded.

  ‘Would I be able to come with you?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course, that would be, well, that would be amazing, it would make all the difference. I never would have expected that,’ I said.

  I had won. And for a second that was all that mattered. An excitement, anticipation of things to come. I felt myself smiling.

  Then I remembered.

  I saw Louisa’s dad walking in the gate of his house. Always alone.

  We arranged where we would meet for the trip to Temple House, and I took her mobile number and personal email details. She walked me to the door of her office. A couple holding hands and carrying wine walked past us in the corridor. We watched them for a second; they looked happy and absorbed in each other. That was possibly what caught our eyes. Some people find their way to some kind of intimacy, and others don’t.

  ‘I’d like to show you the swimming hole,’ she said as we shook hands. ‘You won’t find it unless I am with you.’

  I didn’t know what she referred to, nor its significance, but thanked her again and left for home.

  Chapter Twenty

  I didn’t sleep after our meeting.

  To me, Victoria, with her talk of memories and ghosts, had seemed lost. I don’t know why this was a revelation to me. Possibly because Helen had been so resilient and defensive. I had presumed the Temple House girls were all the same, at least to some extent. But Victoria was different. Perhaps that’s what Louisa had seen in her – a certain romance or Gothic element. Maybe my judgements were biased against them because I knew they had these comfortable lives.