The Temple House Vanishing

by Rachel Donohue

  ‘We cannot choose who we love,’ he said, taking his hand away then.

  My breaths were loud, shallow and rattled in my ears.

  Can we choose who we love? Maybe not, and all of it is decided before, long before.

  ‘It’s not just about her. There are some other things too, and I might have done them differently,’ he said.

  ‘What things?’ I said, looking up at him.

  My eyes felt red and stinging. Like I hadn’t slept for months.

  As he spoke I thought of Helen. Seeking revenge for past indiscretions.

  ‘Well, I can’t say. It seems the nuns thought they wanted me here, but now I don’t think they do. They are not ready for me, and what I bring,’ he said, exhaling smoke.

  The school, a universe of the pure, that none of us fitted in to.

  He stood silently for a moment, his eyes staring into the distance. Then suddenly his energy flared up again. ‘It’s going to come to an end; everything they teach, talk about, it won’t last. They can’t hold it back for much longer. The dusk of the gods.’ He threw his cigarette on the ground and twisted his foot onto it.

  I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I knew today felt like the end of something. It was there in the bare trees and the pink sky. The wet, moist air getting into us and putting out the light.

  A bell was ringing inside, keeping time segmented, cut-up.

  Victoria. How her heart would be broken. I would need to tell her that sometimes you dream, and it’s not real. Nothing is as it seems. He wasn’t the one you were meant to be with.

  ‘I am sort of to blame,’ he said. ‘It was easy to misunderstand. I forget I am your teacher, not. . .’ He stopped and shrugged his shoulders.

  And he spoke the truth. I could see again his knee touching hers, and then the way he had looked at me as we left the forest that first afternoon, and also the gloating Helen sitting silently at his feet. And I thought, shouldn’t you know better? Didn’t he know that we Temple House girls lived for these things, a glance that might stop the world?

  He liked to think he was a force for liberation, someone who would blow the cobwebs from our thoughts and free us from the straitjacket of our narrow and constricted teachings. He wanted to make us not afraid of who we were and the alchemy that lay within. He was offering us sermons and miracles. He embodied the bohemian who walked among the uptight daughters of the professional classes.

  But somehow things had got muddled up. The playing went too far. He had been careless with hearts that were still forming. Everyone had read more into it than was there.

  And he was also naive. He thought he was loved for his mind, but in fact it was his face.

  ‘I think you are great, a great teacher,’ I said, getting to my feet.

  He smiled at me. About us the light had subsided again. He touched my arm the way he often did. The way that he shouldn’t. This time I knew there was pity more than admiration in it.

  ‘It might be best if I do move on, after all this is settled, explained,’ he said.

  And for a second I understood how you might want to kiss him. He was made of magic and light, and it was impossible to catch him without reaching out and grabbing hold. There was nothing romantic about it. There was just the body. I did not want him to leave and sometimes the body speaks clearer than the mind. He was the nearest I could get to Victoria.

  ‘And be brave: you might have to let her go,’ he said, looking at me.

  That was impossible.

  We were meant to be together. Everything was happening because she and I had met. The world was falling down because I loved her. It was an interruption of the normal way of things. People fought wars for love, died on crosses for it. I understood that now. Nothing else mattered.

  The door opened behind us. It was Sister Frances, her face a mask of disapproval.

  She didn’t speak to either of us, but her hand was cold and hard on my shoulder as she directed me back inside.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  I saw neither Helen nor Victoria that day. They had evaporated.

  Art class was cancelled. As was library study.

  No one mentioned the letter or the poem.

  There was chapel at six o’clock. A priest was waiting at the door; he was new. He had a narrow face, grey hair, and eyes that were too staring. He was biting his lip, slowly, over and over, and I thought I saw a spot of blood, a tiny cut on the surface. Sister Ignatius stood on his right-hand side. The thin band of her wedding ring glinted. We walked past them, heads down, and took our seats in the pew. Sister Ignatius sat behind me. I could feel her presence, much as I had felt the empty spirit of the dead nun that first night in the school.

  The sky was an inky, dark blue behind the stained-glass window over the altar. The candles flickered and wavered as the door closed behind us. We said a decade of the rosary, our voices fell and rose in the semi-dark. I thought about having to let Victoria go.

  And I couldn’t do it.

  Mr Lavelle did not want her, and she would need me more than ever. I was her saviour. She was the one who had failed to read the warnings of the prophets. I raised my head to look at the angels on the ceiling, just shadows in the dark, the ecstasy on their faces no longer visible.

  The room was filled with the deep aroma of musk and sweetness. The priest swung the censer over our heads. Clouds of incense so as to purify.

  It would be over soon. That’s what it signalled. All sins can be forgiven and nothing lasts for ever.

  Somebody coughed.

  And I heard the voice of Mr Lavelle whisper in my ear, reminding me that long ago, people had laughed and played cards here. Games of chance. And they had thought not of their sins.

  Then silence again, our heads bowed, our knees sore and turning red. The marks of devotion.

  Sister Ignatius led me not back to the school, but instead through the archway and the door in the wall that led to the nuns’ quarters. The floor changed underfoot from polished parquet to a thick, soft carpet. The type you left footprints on. Sister Ignatius seemed tiny in front of me. It was endlessly surprising to recognize how small a person she was, and how you forgot it so quickly when she spoke. She was a giant then. Her thin navy cardigan pulled tight across her narrow shoulder blades. Dry bones and sinew. Powerful in her slow and measured stride.

  A cleaning woman in her green housecoat and a brush in her hand passed us in the gloom. She stood aside as we walked by. I noticed one of her eyes was milky white. Victoria had once said they only employed people who were wounded, deaf, mute.

  We entered a large dining room, a long mahogany table in the centre with a brass chandelier overhead. A fire was lit in the corner. The priest from the chapel sat at one end, another man in the middle. Sister Ignatius directed me to take a chair. There were teacups on the table and some plates that had leftover sandwiches on them. The air smelled of stale food and stewed tea.

  The priest began to speak about their grave concerns. About what had come to their attention. A correspondence between a student and teacher that was inappropriate. They had spoken already to Mr Lavelle. It was not the first time concerns had been raised about him. Other matters, trifling ones that now seemed more serious. He got too close to some students. He had lots of new ideas about things.

  The new priest looked hungry but alert and awake, leaning over the table, hands tapping the wood. He was ravenous for detail.

  He talked on. My eyes wandered to the window and the sky now black. I felt that I would be leaving very soon and the school would bother me no more. I had a strange sense of grandeur, of access to higher things. Like a peace had descended and I knew exactly what it was I had to do, the calling. The ending. I thought about Mr Lavelle on the steps that morning. And how he knew everything, all of our secrets.

  The sophists.

  Words provided the escape, they were the thing that marked us out. We could dissect, cut them, patch them up together. They were our strange gift. The thing we mastered. I could sa
ve both of them.

  I dragged my gaze back to the table. The room was getting hotter, I pulled at the collar of my shirt. The fire was sparking and spitting orange and red in the corner of my eye.

  The man in the suit said it was an alarming situation. And one that could not be allowed to continue. There would be consequences, and not just for those students involved with Mr Lavelle but for all of us. His eyes darted from one end of the table to the other, but never once rested on me.

  Sister Ignatius took notes. The Holy Book of Observations, as Victoria and I had christened it. When the man stopped she raised her head and asked if I had anything to say on the matter. Her face was composed and impossible to read. And something about the directness of her question, the getting to the point of it all, was to be admired.

  I thought for a second of how I should have asked to speak to my parents. But they were not wise people whose opinion I valued. So I didn’t.

  In my mind I saw Victoria. Her dreams, smashed like bits of coloured glass around her. Little things that she might have collected, and shown to me. All sliding off her lap and broken now. Mr Lavelle wasn’t the one in love with her.

  He wasn’t the one who wanted to run away with her.

  He wasn’t the one who wanted to touch her. Hold her.

  And I said: ‘I wrote the letter and the poem. It was a joke, just something to pass the time. I do that kind of thing, to be funny, to. . . to have something to do. And I am very sorry for it. Mr Lavelle knew nothing about it and did not in any way encourage my attentions.’

  I sort of smiled as I spoke, as if to say: look at me. The stupid teenager. One whose every thought, no matter how dumb, becomes an emotion.

  Sister Ignatius paused and stared at me. Her gaze steady.

  The priest bit his lip again and leaned back in his chair. Satisfied.

  The man in the middle pulled at his tie and breathed out loudly.

  I sat forward and continued: ‘He is very warm and open. He believes in us, wants the best for us, and it can make you think something which you shouldn’t. It’s not him, despite what you may have heard, and I don’t know what that might be.’ I turned my head to look at each of them in turn. ‘But in case you have heard anything, it’s not true either. I’m. . . I’m sure of that.’

  The air in the room was dry. I felt my voice disappearing, like it was slipping down my throat. There was no water on the table.

  ‘It’s possible to be foolish,’ I said, ‘and to see things that are not there. He is the best teacher here and it was just a crush, nothing more.’

  The smile again. Pay no attention to me. I know not what I do.

  Do I regret what I said? I don’t know really, even now. When I have nothing to do but think about it. When so much time has passed, and seasons have changed and people have grown older. And all our mysteries should be resolved by now.

  I thought words were my ally and could be sculpted into stories, shaped into things that people could understand. Because even if a story is not true, it can serve a purpose. Like the miracles the nuns taught us about day after day: the dying and the crippled who can rise from their beds, the man who walked on water, the turning of water into wine. The mystery of Eve and the serpent in the garden. They didn’t happen, never happened, but it didn’t mean they weren’t beautiful ways of looking at the world and explaining things. About the way we are and the things we do.

  And I loved Victoria. I could never tell her this so I lied for her instead. It was the only way to keep her.

  Sister Ignatius spoke again: ‘You are quite sure, that you wrote this letter?’

  I nodded.

  ‘You are not in any way trying to protect someone, someone else?’ she said.

  She pulled in her lips; they were like a thin line. She touched the cross around her neck as she spoke.

  I shook my head again.

  Helen, Victoria, Mr Lavelle. Saving all of them.

  A vocation without meaning.

  The priest led me out of the room.

  We returned to the chapel where I kneeled in the pew while he entered the confession box. Sister Frances stood at the altar, barely discernible in the half-light, just a silhouette, placing the chalice on the altar and finding the correct page of the Bible to leave open for morning prayers. I wondered what she thought of me, sitting there in the dark, or did she even think of me at all? Maybe God dominated her thoughts and I was just one of the lost, anonymous sheep. Nothing special about me. He might choose to save me, he might not.

  After a minute I went into the confession box. I knelt in the dark, hard space and waited for the iron grille to open and his narrow face with the bleeding lip to appear.

  Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  It was after 10 p.m. when I returned to my room. Alice was asleep, a book lay open beside her, torch on the floor. I turned on the lamp beside my bed, covering it with one of my shirts to keep the light low. Sitting on the edge of the bed I started to write a note to Victoria. I would leave it in her room in the morning.

  I stared at the blank page for what felt like hours, the empty blue lines merging and separating. I rubbed my eyes.

  You touch and I fade

  You breathe and I dissolve

  You speak and I am deaf

  You leave and I fall

  My pen scratched against the page. I was exhausted, my thoughts jumbled; feelings, secrets, desires leaking out on to the page. The pen was slipping from my hands, the blue ink stained the edge of the white bedsheet. I rubbed it with my fingers and only made it worse. I lay back against the pillow.

  They would send me away. I would never see her again. I wrote my address and phone number down for Victoria. Just in case.

  The fog horn sounded down the coast, deep and low. My eyes were closing.

  I climbed under the covers, not bothering to undress. And when I dreamed it wasn’t of Victoria. It was of a forest in the mist, on the edge of a cliff. I was high up above it looking down, the waves crashing beneath me.

  Helen was back. She was sitting in the middle of the sixth years’ table as usual. She nodded to the girl beside her as I laid my tray down. Then she ate her toast slowly without taking her eyes off me. Like a medieval queen at court.

  A murmur ran around the room as I took my seat. I was ravenously hungry and thirsty, like I had run a race in the night. I could feel their stares. Glances like tiny arrows of disdain.

  There was no art class listed on the timetable on the wall outside the Hall. No Mr Lavelle on the steps with his coffee either, just the toing and froing of men setting up the fair and parking old-fashioned cars on the gravel driveway.

  I spotted Alice going up the stairs and ran after her, asking if she knew where Mr Lavelle was. She shook her head before continuing up the stairs. I was about to follow her when she turned back, a look of pity on her face as she stared down at me.

  ‘They have asked him to leave. Helen told me,’ she said.

  ‘Because of the letter?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, but other things too,’ she whispered. ‘Victoria’s parents have been in touch with the school. I think they are going to make a complaint. And Helen, her parents did too. They said he was not, as a teacher, not. . .’ Her words drifted off.

  I felt weak and leaned against the banister. It had been for nothing. I had lied and it would serve no purpose. I had lied so Mr Lavelle could keep his job, and so Victoria would not be sent away for wanting him.

  ‘Why did you do it?’ she said, shaking her head. ‘It’s one thing to write a letter to him, but to try and blame it on Helen. . .’

  Students pushed past us. Alice glanced at them as if vaguely embarrassed.

  I couldn’t answer. There was too much, but also too little to say. Figments, phantoms, dreams, visions. Love was all of these things and none of them real. An act of imagination.

  ‘It wasn’t wise,’ she said, frowning.

  She left then and I knew I could
not ask her any more about it. The Maidens swayed past me, all knee-socked, crisp, blonde perfection. One of them pretended to hold her nose as they moved around me and they all laughed. They had been chosen to do tours of the schools later that day. The day the organizers of the festivities and their wives were to come and gape at the girls with their brushed golden hair and black velvet hairbands. The girls on the hill.

  I skipped French class. It was possible to not be missed that day as various students had been assigned different tasks to get ready for the visitors, so there was an air of confusion and the rigid roll call would not be adhered to. I walked to the summer house, leaving the school through the front porch to avoid any teachers. Many of the tents and stalls for the fete were still only half built. A woman in a long blue dress was twirling a hoop, two small children played beside her. They stopped talking as I passed and stared. They were sucking giant red lollipops. A man with snowy white hair and a trombone was sitting beside the gate to the walled garden. Despite the grey of the morning he was wearing sunglasses. He tapped his foot as I passed. His shoes were shiny and black.

  I thought about Victoria as I walked through the garden. When we were apart, at weekends, I had taken to living as if she was watching me. I read books that I knew she would approve of, took out French films from the video store that she had mentioned in passing, bought a paler shade of foundation. I lived as if her eyes were on me, as if I had to make her proud, make her faith in me justified. I had to be perfect. Worthy.

  She watched over me. Time and space were no barriers. She could see me now.

  I pushed open the door to the summer house. Helen was cleaning out some of the cupboards filled with art supplies. Beside her the door to the cabinet of curiosities stood open.

  I felt my breath catch in my chest.

  ‘You did it then, Louisa. You took my advice,’ she said, looking up and appearing not in the least bit surprised to see me there.