The Temple House Vanishing

by Rachel Donohue

She went back to emptying the shelves, placing crayons, charcoal and pencils in some large brown boxes. It was a surprisingly menial task for her. She was looking for something – possibly the picture of her?

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I did, for Victoria and Mr Lavelle, because it’s not true what everyone is saying about him.’

  ‘Isn’t it? It hardly made things better for him, admitting you wrote those things,’ she said, looking up briefly again.

  She got up off her knees, wiped her hands on her skirt, and walked over to the window, the one that faced the forest and the path that led to the swimming hole.

  ‘I was protecting him,’ I said.

  And Victoria.

  ‘From whom?’ she said, her back to me.

  ‘You,’ I said. ‘You wanted to damage him, get rid of him.’

  ‘Oh please,’ she answered, shaking her head and a smirk on her lips. ‘He is his own worst enemy. You all are. I didn’t write the letter.’

  Victoria. I could feel her there in the room. The sense of her. Watching me.

  ‘What happened at the party, at Victoria’s the other night?’ I said.

  ‘After you left, Mr Lavelle spoke to her, tried to explain that her feelings for him had gone too far. She couldn’t take it. We overheard them arguing in the garden and Victoria’s father came out. I don’t know, but I imagine she then made up some kind of story about him.’ She turned to face me. ‘That’s why she hasn’t been in this week.’

  ‘If you knew all this, if you were so sure about it the other night, why didn’t you tell me?’ I said.

  ‘But you knew she wrote it,’ she said, shrugging her shoulders slightly. ‘You made a choice to lie for her. Collateral damage.’

  I sank down on to the chair near the stove. A scene at the party. The public humiliation of Victoria. I could feel her shame. It would make her do foolish things.

  ‘The person you need to talk to is Victoria. She tried to set me and Mr Lavelle up. You should find her and ask her why,’ she said, walking to the couch and sitting down.

  She looked calm and controlled, the uniform perfectly straight and laundered, her hair tied in a bun high on her head. Any sense of the nerves from the other night gone.

  Dominion restored.

  There was noise outside; some of the younger classes were in the walled garden. I could hear shouts and Sister Agnes calling for attention.

  ‘You might also ask her why she told you nothing of this. Despite your closeness,’ Helen said, her eyebrows arched. ‘Don’t feel bad, though. You were just convenient to Victoria, the audience she always needs for her drama. This year’s model.’

  She was cruel. People are when defending their world.

  She looked at me, crossing her arms. ‘You know it’s a habit of hers, don’t you?’

  She continued before I could get any words out.

  The story of the other friend.

  ‘Her last friend had to leave also. They were planning to run away together, bags packed and everything when they were caught on the driveway at midnight. It was almost amusing.’ She smirked again, looking down briefly at her watch. ‘So unfortunate, to get so tangled up with her, and him.’

  Her voice hard when he was mentioned.

  I tried to imagine Victoria at midnight on the dark driveway, frustrated, thwarted. Her plans shredded. It made me want to protect her even more. Everyone conspiring against her. We didn’t belong here. There was another future, another place for us.

  And below this selflessness, I felt something else. The familiar stain of rejection. I was the only one she never planned to run away with.

  ‘I believe in loyalty, Helen, and in standing by people we lo— care for and admire,’ I said. ‘Mr Lavelle is a great teacher and Victoria is my friend.’

  I tried once more to ape her majesty, slow my words down, control my hands, not stutter or sweat.

  ‘I had an aunt once who was really full of energy,’ she said, ‘always volunteering for things and doing classes in the evening. Everyone admired her. Then one day she just collapsed and had to go to hospital.’

  I thought to myself, Victoria is here. She sees it all, she will come for me.

  ‘And they found out she had this condition. I don’t know what it was. Anyway, it turned out everything about her, all the energy, the running around, had actually been part of the condition and not her personality or character at all. Can you imagine?’ She looked at me. ‘Everything she is, everything we understand her to be, is an illness.’

  She stood up then and walked over to the cabinet, shutting the door gently.

  ‘Do you see where I am going with this?’ she said as the door clicked shut.

  I didn’t respond.

  ‘Because it’s the way you should see Victoria. It’s all an act, to conceal the craziness in her,’ she said. ‘And I should know, we’ve been forced to play together since we were children. I have had to endure her for far longer than anyone else here. She imagined Mr Lavelle was in love with her.’

  Mr Lavelle’s words came back to me. When he had silently moved the chess pieces around on the board and talked of her mastery. Victoria as sphinx.

  ‘He made her think there was something between them. He didn’t mean to, but he did,’ I said. ‘She made a mistake, he made a mistake.’

  ‘So he is guilty, to some degree?’ she said.

  Agree with me. He uses girls like us.

  ‘It’s just the way he is. . .’ I couldn’t think how to explain it.

  ‘I did try and warn you,’ she responded, walking over to my chair.

  ‘No you didn’t, you tried to pin the whole letter on me,’ I said, looking up at her.

  ‘I wanted to see what you knew, I wanted to see. . .’ She paused. ‘I wanted to see what you would do. It was a test of your loyalty, and your supposed intellect.’

  ‘But you couldn’t know I would say I wrote it?’ I said.

  ‘No, if you hadn’t admitted it, I would have said it was from Victoria. But I had a feeling you would take the blame for her,’ she said. ‘Look, if anyone was going to be the one to get him out of the school it was you. You were straight out of central casting, the one he would seduce, the cheap slut. You did everything you were supposed to.’ She was smiling again.

  I jumped up from the chair; she stepped back.

  She didn’t rule me, or any of us.

  ‘You don’t know anything, Helen,’ I said, ‘you don’t know anything about me or Victoria.’

  ‘Don’t I?’ she said. ‘Victoria is one of us. You are the one that has never been quite bright enough to see that.’

  I was shaking. I could walk to the cabinet, take out the knife, plunge it deep into her heart. That is something that Victoria would understand, Mr Lavelle too. It would be beyond Helen to know passion, how to sacrifice yourself for someone else.

  ‘It’s not a sin to love someone, to want them. . .’ I could feel tears and I couldn’t let myself cry in front of her.

  Because she had won. She had seen and understood everything.

  ‘I pity you, really,’ Helen said, walking back to the window.

  ‘Does everyone think I sent the letter to him?’ I asked, trying to calm my breathing and looking up at the vine that reached over our heads.

  She nodded.

  ‘Do people know about Victoria, her parents making a complaint?’ I said.

  ‘No, only the prefects, and the nuns will work around it. He’s not the first unusual teacher they have had to move on.’

  ‘What are the other things he is supposed to have done?’ I asked.

  She looked vaguely irritated then and walked away from the window and back to the cupboards and trays that were strewn on the floor. She kicked one with her foot and a paintbrush rolled out.

  ‘Is it about you and him? Did Victoria tell her parents about that too?’ I asked, my voice raised.

  Her back was to me. I could see her tense up.

  ‘There is no him and me; he is a diversion from
the boredom here, nothing more,’ she said, her voice quiet. ‘I’m not mad.’

  Keep the outside positive and shiny and you can get away with anything.

  ‘There is no proof anyway,’ she said, turning back to look at me. ‘Ask Victoria what she told her parents. She will be here tonight to pack up.’

  I could see her sitting in front of him on the floor at the party. The intimacy of it.

  ‘Where is she going?’ I asked, panic in my voice.

  ‘Her parents need to bury her somewhere else for a while, see if she can avoid another unfortunate entanglement in the next place,’ she said. ‘Her mother has been on the phone to mine all week, in despair at how her precious, perfect daughter could have been so badly used by this cad of a man. And we all have to play along, nod our heads and see her as a victim.’

  On the phone all week.

  ‘Besides, Sister Ignatius has had enough. Diplomacy and connections will only take you so far. Victoria is more trouble than she is worth.’

  I thought about the line of Virginia Woolf’s that I had transcribed in my diary, the one about someone having to die so others could value life more.

  Helen bent down to the floor, putting the stray brush back in the tray.

  ‘Where do you think he will go?’ I asked, standing up, legs weak.

  I could hear the bell in the school.

  ‘Abroad. Africa, probably,’ she said. ‘The school will give him recommendations. He is sort of a gypsy, not suited to teaching; thinks he is, of course. He barely even covers the correct curriculum here. It won’t matter so much over there.’

  ‘But you, you and him. . .?’ I said.

  And the letters he told me you sent him. And the picture.

  We stared at each other in silence for a second.

  And for a moment all the stories of him were back, the aesthetics of his existence and how they had captivated Victoria and me. And I thought of Helen lying on the couch for him.

  ‘What if I tell people, tell them that it was Victoria? That she made it all up: the complaint, the letter, the poem?’ I said.

  ‘You wouldn’t do that to her,’ she said.

  And she was right. I couldn’t do that to her.

  ‘And besides, he is guilty of something; we just don’t know quite what. Victoria has probably exaggerated, but we know he did nothing to dissuade her. He enjoys it,’ she said.

  There was revenge in her voice. She too had misread him. He had drawn her naked on the couch. And she regretted it all now.

  I walked to the door and as I did the cabinet of curiosities caught my eye once more.

  ‘He won’t leave this behind,’ I said. ‘He will come back for his things and the collector’s things. They meant something.’

  I tried to sound defiant. To remind her that mystery existed. And with it hope.

  She looked at the cabinet briefly.

  ‘They never belonged to him,’ she said.

  And it seemed like all we stood for dissolved in the acid of her words.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  It was after 4 p.m., almost dark, when I spotted the car parked at the side of the house. Victoria’s parents were here. I ran to her room, expecting to see her packing up, but she was not there and there was no sign of anything gone. Maybe Helen was wrong. Victoria wouldn’t be leaving. The storm would pass.

  I sat on her bed. There were books piled up on the side table – Wuthering Heights, Moby-Dick, Pride and Prejudice among them. Hardback, expensive versions, deep red in colour with gold embossed lettering on the spines, the pages turned down in places. Gifts to her, bestowed at birthday parties, in exclusive hotels, with the tinkling of pianos in the background. Rooms with sea views.

  I left my poem under the pillow. She would understand when she read it.

  I found the girl who shared with her; she was studying in the library. She didn’t know where Victoria was. I walked to the summer house for what seemed like the millionth time. The lights were off. I opened the door, imagining she would be there in the gloom. But she wasn’t. All of Mr Lavelle’s things were gone. The throws and rugs packed away, the art books and paints stored neatly in boxes. It felt like a place that had been deserted for years. A folly constructed and abandoned at the edge of the woods. The vine hung down heavy over my head, brown and dry. The cabinet was locked tight. The collector’s menagerie sealed. I touched the curved glass, tracing its protruding outline.

  The sense of an ending again, but this time I felt not hope but anxiety, a falling downward.

  I walked back through the walled garden, passing a group of the festival organizers and the Maidens. There was the smell of thick perfume, hairspray and aftershave as I squeezed past them on the path. They had dressed in their Sunday best to see us. A man with a cigar stood back to look at me as I went past. He was fat, rolls of flesh spilling over his collar. ‘Cheer up,’ he said and a few people laughed.

  At the front of the house, the scene resembled something from a dream. There were balloons attached to stands, men leaning over cars doing the last of the polishing in the low light. A woman was lugging a crate of teacups out of the back of a white van. The school dinner ladies stood in a line on the steps leading up to the school, their green housecoats blowing gently around their knees. One of the nuns stood in the Maiden’s Chamber above the door, surveying all. Just an outline of black against the red and blue window.

  Other men were standing around a white convertible sports car, smoking and laughing and looking at the darkening sky, hoping for a dry day tomorrow. I saw the gulls overhead and felt like telling them: it will rain, rain on your parade. That’s how it will be remembered. See how cheerful you feel about that.

  There was the smell of burning leaves in the damp air again.

  I tried to focus my thoughts, bring them back from the edge. Where would Victoria be? Did she know the letter had been found and that I was now the supposed author? That Mr Lavelle was leaving, banished? Helen had seen to it. I had to let her know I had tried to fix things. Mine was the act demanded of love.

  I saw her again as she had been that first time in the summer house. The curled-up body, the glance that had asked me to prove myself. It had been there from the beginning. I didn’t want to be her. I wanted to be with her. For ever. We shared a fate, and she must see that. There was an inevitability to us. A finishing of each other’s story.

  It was time to tell her.

  A black bike was leaning against the side wall of the school. It was unlocked.

  She would go to him.

  To his cottage in the village.

  She would rank her loves, like they told us Saint Augustine had preached. For when we sin it is only because our loves have become disordered.

  And Mr Lavelle’s name was before mine.

  I had to tell her to erase it. Because it would be better that way.

  I knew the road to the village from the journey to and from the school. It was dark now and the bike had no light. I cycled along the narrow lanes, past the dusky hedgerows, startling the occasional rabbit and fox with the fury of the bike and its squeaking chain.

  I found his cottage easily. It was as Victoria had described, a gate lodge just on the edge of the village. A long driveway was behind it, leading to what must have been a big house. A light, covered in cobwebs, was lit over the front door. His car was nowhere in sight. I leaned the bike up against the wall and rang the bell. I thought I heard a noise inside but no one came to the door. The front windows were not lit up so I climbed over a low wall and went around the side. The back door was swinging open, a faint light reflected from within on to the grass outside, which was long and wet against my legs. A small bowl was beside the door. If he had a dog, he had never mentioned it.

  ‘He feeds the foxes,’ she said.

  She gave me a fright. A disembodied voice in the gloom.

  Victoria had been sitting unseen on a bench at the end of the garden, and now emerged from the shadows into the patch of light. She was
wearing her uniform. I remember for some reason that gave me hope. Maybe she was staying.

  And joy rose in me. Like it always did. And a mild forgetting, as if each time I saw her it was the first moment all over again.

  ‘He’s been told not to, but he still does it.’ She walked slowly towards me. ‘And isn’t that just like something he would do?’

  ‘Victoria, this week without you, it’s been a nightmare,’ I said, reaching out for her.

  She stepped back, almost imperceptibly. I ignored it and reached out to hug her. She did not respond with any warmth. She felt cold, thin, like me. Like we were both empty, as if the truth of our unspoken love had left a gap, like the dead nun in the chapel.

  ‘Can we go inside?’ I said, feeling a sense of enormous relief to be with her. To have found her.

  She nodded, watching me in the dark.

  The kitchen was tiny, the lights were off, and the small light there was came from a log fire. The fireplace was large and covered in black soot; it stretched almost the length of the wall. The kitchen was tidy, no unwashed dishes or food in sight. There were hooks on the back of the door but nothing hung there. There were some books on the windowsill and a folder of papers on the table but nothing else to suggest who the occupant was, or indeed if there was one.

  ‘He’s not here,’ she said, sitting on the chair by the fire, her legs hooked up under her in the shape of a Z.

  ‘I was looking for you,’ I said, sitting down at her feet.

  I warmed my hands against the heat of the fire.

  ‘Were you?’ she said, staring at the flames.

  ‘Yes, I told you this week has been. . .’ I began, then leaned my head against the side of her chair.

  I felt exhausted suddenly, like I might sleep.

  She lit a cigarette.

  ‘He’s gone away, you know.’ Her voice was quiet and low.

  ‘They made him,’ I said, turning to look up at her.

  One side of her face was in darkness. She stayed looking straight ahead at the fire.

  ‘They found out, the letter and the poem. . .’ I could not bring myself to say it. I turned back to look at the fire. My eyes wanting to close.

  ‘Oh that,’ she said, stretching herself in the chair. ‘That was just a joke.’