The Temple House Vanishing

by Rachel Donohue

  ‘We were plagued with flashers. Are you Catholic?’ she asked.

  ‘Raised to be,’ I answered.

  ‘What age are you?’ she asked then.

  There was something direct, a kind of boldness to her.

  I ignored the question. She had no right to know my age.

  She sighed then as if my silence explained it all. The difference of a decade or so.

  We emerged from under the trees and the drive turned in a slow curve leading to the house. The cliffs and sea appeared off to our left, a sudden dispersal of the forest, like a gap opening up. It was windier, colder, as we left the shelter of the trees and for the first time I could hear the waves against the rocks. We passed a disused, net-less tennis court surrounded by a rusting high fence, standing almost on the edge of the cliffs. The gate to it was unlocked and swung back and forth in the wind. There were what must have been playing fields further away to the side of the house, now just empty and filled with weeds and an abandoned, waterless pond. The once white, low wall at its edge, now stained brown. In some parts there was graffiti that someone had then painted over in an attempt to conceal it.

  ‘Is that the swimming hole?’ I asked as we skirted the edges.

  She shook her head and we walked on.

  Temple House came into view around the next bend, somehow magnificent in its decrepitude and isolation. And for a minute I held my breath. Victoria stopped too. It looked like loneliness brought to life. It was red brick, three storeys tall with a round turret stuck on one end. The front windows were long and on one side faced out to the coast. Many of them were broken, panes smashed and, in some cases, missing glass entirely. Like they had been blinded. There were ‘Danger’ and ‘Hazard’ signs lying in the grass near the broken and uneven front steps which swept up to what was once a grand entrance. Above the porch, over the closed front door, there was a large arched window with stained glass, some of which was also broken and in parts hanging delicately, precariously. Ivy covered much of the building.

  I took a few photos on my phone. Victoria stood beside me. She seemed twitchy and uneasy.

  ‘It looks as it should,’ she said, ‘just as I imagined it. With its soul hanging out, its rotten soul.’

  I was surprised by the vehemence of her tone.

  ‘It’s to be demolished soon,’ I said, looking up.

  ‘It has been on the verge of being demolished for years now,’ she said, ‘yet it always seems to avoid it.’

  There were birds nesting under the eaves of the roof. Every now and then one would swoop in over our heads and disappear into the cavity.

  ‘Can’t you feel it, the air?’ she said. ‘Louisa always said she was so cold here. It was the first thing she noticed. She used to pull the sleeves of her jumper down over her hands, they were always purple. It wasn’t just cold she was feeling, but despair.’

  She turned away from the house as she spoke and looked back over the driveway, the overgrown lawns and the tennis courts. The sea was grey in the distance.

  ‘Even when it was painted up and supposed to be grand, the place was dead, dead inside,’ she said.

  I thought about the Church and how it had been dreamed away. The rules not rigid and permanent as everyone had thought, but ephemeral. A world that had drifted from us.

  ‘Were they harsh, cruel, the nuns?’ I asked.

  In my head I saw black straps and crosses. Orphans and lost women. But it can’t have been like that. It was 1990.

  ‘It depends how you define cruelty,’ she said. ‘You know, Louisa used to say how they were nicest to the richest girls. They gave them the best rooms, they got the most praise, won all the awards, even when they were the thickest in the class. It really annoyed her. She said the nuns were snobs; they were the opposite, in fact, of what they were supposed to be. Enamoured with money, the gloss of it.’

  I didn’t respond. It didn’t seem that surprising, really. I had once visited the Vatican, which to me appeared to be all about money and gloss.

  ‘Louisa and the others, the other scholarship girls, they were a kind of experiment, you see. They were trying to find the best. . .’ her voice trailed off. ‘But you know, I think Louisa had, not a calling, but a certain fascination with them. The idea of living here as a bride of Christ, renouncing the flesh. Something about that appealed to her.

  ‘There was beauty too, you see,’ she said, her voice slow, hesitant, ‘and a kind of magic.’

  Wine that turned into blood.

  ‘You saw them differently, the nuns?’ I said.

  ‘I remember anxiety about sin, reputation, failure, conformity. They didn’t beat you, of course, or even shout that much. They didn’t need to. They weakened you with mind games and nightmares about limbo, and hell. Saints who died agonizing deaths all for the love of God. And you were watched, all the time. If not by them, by the Holy Spirit,’ she said.

  She turned her head sharply as she said this, as if she heard something.

  ‘It was a disaster of an education if you had any kind of an imagination or were superstitious. It just fuelled your belief in the unknown, made you see things that weren’t there.’ As she spoke, her eyes were looking from one side of the grounds to the other.

  ‘And Lavelle, did he protect you from it?’ I asked, watching her.

  ‘He was the antidote.’ She turned to face me. ‘That’s why we were all in love with him.’

  Her words just lay there, in the damp air. Suspended by the light mist blowing in from the coast. Factual and unadorned. I pulled my scarf tighter around my neck.

  He was no longer the hollow man.

  We were getting somewhere. I wanted to press her, chase down her words, but I held back. She was setting the pace and I had to follow.

  I took more photos and then we tried to open the front door. It was barred and bolted. I followed her around the side of the house. She pointed to various windows, including her own on the second floor. I asked where Louisa’s room had been and she told me it was at the back of the house.

  We walked through what must have been a walled garden of some sort, thick with weeds along a barely discernible winding path. An old-fashioned lawnmower leaned against the wall in the corner beside some buckets and a pitchfork. She walked on, slower this time, touching some of the long grasses with her hand. There was no birdsong here, only the call of white gulls high above our heads.

  ‘Can you tell me about that last night?’ I asked as we walked on towards a gate in the wall.

  She stopped for a moment and turned back to face me.

  ‘I am telling you,’ she said. ‘That’s why we are here.’

  There was irritation in her eyes. A hardness to her glance.

  We walked on. Her back lean and straight. The air between us less companionable now.

  The gate in the wall was rotten and although locked we were able to lean against it and push through. We were in full wilderness now; my jeans were wet around my ankles, the mist seemed to be heavier here, as if the walls of the garden had been shielding us from full exposure to the coast. Up ahead, nestled in the trees, was a wooden summer house, a rotunda, its white paint peeling. It looked like something out of a fairy tale, where a huntsman or woodcutter might have lived.

  Her step was suddenly lighter and quicker.

  ‘This was the art room, the summer house,’ she said.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ I said as we got nearer, fishing out my phone again to take some photos.

  And it was. It had a lost, faded glamour to it that made you think of tea parties and croquet on the lawn.

  It was covered in a heavy green vine, and the door was almost completely hidden. Victoria pulled the branches aside and pushed on the door which opened easily.

  The floor was carpeted with leaves and the room bare, except for an old stove covered in dust and dead flies. It was freezing inside, and damp, mouldy.

  ‘We had all our classes here,’ she said, turning slowly in the centre of the room.


  Over our heads, the vine was sinewy and had completely covered the ceiling. It made you feel like you were underground, in a cave. The windows, which ran the whole way around the building, were grubby, though unlike those at the main house, these had not been smashed.

  ‘It’s odd to be back,’ she said, ‘though also not so. I dream about it. Here, this room, and the swimming hole.’

  ‘What was it like. . . back then?’ I said.

  ‘There were couches, and the smell of cigarette smoke, we all used to sit here, and the cabinet of curiosities was in the corner. We each took an item from it and we got to paint it. It became your emblem for that year.’

  There was a distant tone of faded excitement in her voice.

  ‘Is that cabinet in one of the photos you sent me?’ I asked.

  She nodded.

  ‘What was your emblem?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh I can’t remember,’ she said, now seeming disinterested in discussing it.

  ‘You said before, about Mr Lavelle, that everyone was in love with him,’ I said. ‘Was Louisa? I mean, were they in love with each other?’

  ‘He admired her,’ she said. Her voice was tight, guarded. ‘She was different from the rest of us, she had it harder. There was something more real to her, more definite.’

  ‘An outsider,’ I said.

  ‘They were both outcasts. Him, by choice, I think, and her, well not so,’ she said.

  She walked to the windows and rubbed away some of the dirt.

  ‘Did he have a relationship with her?’ I asked. I couldn’t help myself. I really wanted to say an inappropriate, abusive relationship but held back.

  She looked vaguely affronted, and I noticed she hugged herself with her arms.

  The tension was back again between us.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Her relationship was with me, really. She, she got caught up and then she tried to save me and it all went wrong and. . .’

  She slid slowly then down the dirty window and crouched on the floor. I walked over to her and leaned down.

  She stayed looking at the floor.

  ‘There was nothing between them that you knew of?’ I said.

  She wiped her eyes, still not looking up.

  ‘It’s just Helen said to me that Louisa and Lavelle were always together, that she thought they were having some kind of an affair, a relationship. . .’ I said.

  I could feel my own insistence rising.

  Victoria lifted her head up to look at me. The sadness was gone. She reminded me almost of a child, a bold child who had been sent to her room and was wary of any offer of forgiveness. Sullen and sulky.

  ‘Helen.’ She said her name with a snarl.

  I stood up again and moved away. Like I needed some distance, perspective on her.

  ‘She was nothing, nothing to him ever,’ she said. ‘She didn’t know anything about us.’

  She had put her head down again and was tracing a shape with her fingers in the dirt.

  ‘Victoria, I know this must be hard, coming back here, but. . .’ I began, then stopped.

  It was a weird place. Victoria seemed to be getting more distracted and strange the longer we stayed. For the first time I wished I hadn’t come alone with her. I felt for my phone in my pocket. It was solid, reassuring.

  She must have sensed my irritation and unease.

  ‘I have to show you first,’ she said, speaking slowly. ‘We are not leaving yet.’

  There was a deadness in her words. Like they were weighed down.

  ‘Show me what?’ I asked.

  ‘What happened,’ she said.

  I felt close, really close now. And also afraid.

  ‘Where?’ I said.

  ‘At the swimming hole,’ she answered, ‘on the last night.’

  She was looking up at me. Her eyes a kind of challenge. I felt both curious and filled with dread.

  I pulled her into a standing position and offered her some water from my bottle. She took a deep, long drink from it, and I gestured to her to keep it.

  As we walked to the door she asked me, in what seemed apropos of nothing, if I had ever been in love.

  The mood had changed again, like a breeze blowing in and out.

  ‘Yes, I think so,’ I said.

  ‘If you only think so,’ she said, ‘then it’s not the real thing.’

  ‘That’s quite presumptuous,’ I replied, trying to sound lighter than I felt. ‘How would you know?’

  Then I thought of my life. And how, without meaning to, I had emptied it of people.

  She just shrugged her shoulders.

  We pulled the rotten and crumbling door shut behind us. It was soft and malleable in my hands. The kingdom of the art room was slowly returning to the earth.

  ‘I chose a heart,’ she said, stopping for a moment in front of me, ‘as my object from the cabinet.’

  Behind her the forest was a smudged, misty outline of branches, bare and sparse.

  ‘A pickled heart,’ she said, turning around to me.

  It sounded gruesome and medieval.

  ‘That was my emblem,’ she said and her eyes were wide and alight.

  She was impossible to pin down, an energy around her that was unpredictable and unsettling.

  She walked on then towards the woods.

  ‘What did Louisa choose?’ I asked, moving quickly to keep up with her. I was finding it hard to keep the nerves out of my voice.

  ‘A skull,’ she said.

  I stopped.

  ‘And no one ever chose the skull,’ she said, her words slow and measured as she walked on ahead of me, her lines rehearsed and pitch perfect. As if we were in a play.

  I remembered the essay about the skull in the folder Victoria sent me. The heart and the skull. Entwined and connected.

  What happens to one without the other?

  I looked up to the sky. A large white bird soared above our heads, blown in off the coast, suspended, then released by the wind.

  With a flicker of fear I followed her, deeper and deeper into the grey, watery woods.

  Louisa

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Victoria was not in school the Monday after the party. I was relieved, in a way.

  I did not want to tell her I had seen Helen and Mr Lavelle together. I wonder about this now. It should have been the first thing I told her that night. Instead, I had left her house without saying even goodbye. I should have warned her, I should have said the words, I’m not sure he loves you. But I didn’t.

  My mother used to say that if you wait too long to make a decision, it tends to be made for you. I think this is probably true. You can be struck with a fatal passivity.

  I walked the hallways that Monday as I always did when without her. Alone and at a distance from everyone. The girls around me rushed and chatted, books crashing to the floor in the overcrowded narrow corridors, answers to Christmas tests being scribbled on arms and secrets whispered in ears with cupped hands. The sense of holidays in the ether. But I moved slowly, as if time was of no consequence to me.

  And I felt somehow older, taller even, than everyone around me. And sadder too, a gloom in my heart. If what she said was true, Victoria and Mr Lavelle would be leaving after Christmas. I would be the orphan left behind.

  From this distance, all these years later, I know it is possible to completely imagine the world. That there is your unreality and no other. We move in little isolated globes of our own making, and they are as real to us as anything we might touch or taste. Sometimes you wake for a moment and you realize it was not how you thought it was, but then the call of the imagined is usually stronger and you drift back. It is how you make sense of things. Stories and fairy tales. You are happier in the land of make-believe.

  I think I may have misunderstood most things that happened to me. But I am never able to fully think of the enormity of what this might mean. There is no point anyway now.

  Victoria did dream up her world; she was shameless about it. Though I could n
ot fully admit this. I admired her too much. And there was always the possibility that Mr Lavelle and Helen were just as Victoria described. A one-sided infatuation that would play itself out. It would die on the steps of the school when Helen watched Victoria and him speed off in a cloud of dust.

  I had art that afternoon. The bell rang, I changed my shoes and walked out into the walled garden that led to the summer house. It was windy and grey, the sky heavy with rain, and the garden was bare and sparse. I felt numb; half there, barely seen. Sister Agnes, the science teacher, was in the garden. She was a large woman, white hair escaping from the side of her veil, her broad face red as she slowly leaned down to the ground. She was picking an upturned jar out of the soil. I felt a need to speak to her, someone, anyone.

  ‘Trapping things, Sister?’ I said as I walked past.

  See me, hear me.

  She looked up.

  ‘Oh yes, you know the way it is. Dirt, always revealing itself,’ she said.

  I liked her. She was warmer than the others. Her eyes had life in them.

  I tried to imagine her young, hopeful. Bags packed, a new life awaiting at the end of the long journey.

  ‘Be careful, tread easy now,’ she said as I walked on.

  I was the first to arrive in the summer house. The door was open and the lights on, but it was empty. I put on the kettle and went to look at the cabinet of curiosities. Its sheer oddness and beauty never failed to ignite something in me. I tried to open the door but it was locked. I knew Mr Lavelle kept the tiny key on his belt. For some reason, looking at the cabinet that afternoon made me think of the tabernacle in the church. A tiny, adorned box, with its own gold curtains. A temple to mystery and curiosity. I looked at the heart in the cloudy jar and thought about Victoria’s essay and the hearts she had taken to drawing on every surface, even her school bag. They were interlocking and blood red, sometimes with thorns cutting them open.

  I made the tea in Victoria’s cat mug and sat down on the overstuffed couch. I thought about this place and what it must be like to be with him, here alone. I wondered why Victoria hadn’t had sex with him. I knew if it had been me and I felt about him as she did, I would have. Like the boy from my old school, the one who always wore a Les Misérables shirt. I had felt nothing with him, relieved, maybe. Like something else was done, achieved. A body explored, bought.