The Temple House Vanishing

by Rachel Donohue

  She leaned forward then and flicked some ash into the fire.

  Of all the things I thought she would say, that was not what I expected. There was a lightness in her voice I recognized. It was the one we used when telling one another amusing stories about the downfall of others. The words rising slightly at the end.

  ‘Why did you send it?’ I said, watching the flames, my face growing hot.

  ‘He needed to see I was serious, that there was no way back,’ she said.

  She was inhaling. I could hear the catch in her voice.

  ‘Back from what?’ I said.

  The fire was hypnotic. I could see edges and cliffs, waves of orange and burning light. I remembered drying my hair in front of the fire at home when I was young and my mother telling me to count all the faces I could see in the flames.

  ‘Our future, all our plans,’ she said.

  She moved in the chair, turned towards the window more fully, and her face when I looked again was in shadow.

  ‘Last week at the party, he just wouldn’t hear me properly, he didn’t seem to understand, so I needed him to see there was no way back. If everyone knew about us. . .’ She sounded confused, perplexed somehow.

  ‘Did you fight?’ I said.

  ‘No, just. . . he wasn’t sure about running away together,’ she said. ‘He was worried about the consequences, for me, not him.’ She leaned down towards me and whispered in my ear, ‘He always puts me first.’

  Her breath was warm and smelled of smoke.

  She sat back in the chair. I watched her with new eyes, looking for signs. Naively, I thought that maybe there was still a way of deciphering who she truly was.

  ‘Why did you send it to Helen and Sister Ignatius and not just to him?’ I asked.

  Saying those words was an effort. I had to force them.

  She shrugged her shoulders. ‘To show Helen he is mine,’ she said. ‘I was sick of her.’

  ‘But you knew Helen would protect herself, would blame him, us?’ I said, moving my back away from the chair and looking up at her, to see her more clearly.

  The fire was hot behind me.

  She didn’t respond, closing her eyes briefly. I felt she had been infected with fatigue also, the role too demanding now for both of us. Irony had drained our energy.

  ‘Where has he gone?’ I asked, staring at her.

  ‘He rang me last night, he couldn’t really talk. I think there were people here and it was late. But he said he would be going abroad and would write to me when he got settled, would send for me,’ she said.

  She was awake again. Her eyes wide open in the firelight.

  I couldn’t play along any more. It had all become too real. She had to stop loving him. I gripped her chair, summoning the energy to call her back. To call myself back.

  ‘Victoria, he told me he wasn’t going to run away with you, that you. . . you imagined it,’ I said, moving closer again, kneeling in front of her.

  She sat up slightly and started picking the fabric fraying at the corner of the armrest. My words were in the air around us.

  She breathed in slowly, eyes not meeting mine but resting somewhere on the dark wall above the fireplace. She held the cigarette away from her.

  ‘Helen said your parents made a complaint about him. The letter you sent, it’s caused all kinds of shit, can’t you see that?’ I touched her hand where it lay on the armrest of the chair.

  She withdrew it and looked down at me. Her eyes were wide, the light from the fire reflected in them.

  ‘I did not expect you, of all people, to speak to me like that; you know what we have, what we mean to each other,’ she said. ‘I would expect this of Helen, or my parents, but not you.’

  She threw the last of the cigarette into the fire.

  ‘I am worried about you. I just want to protect you, that’s why. . .’ I stopped and put my head down.

  ‘Why what?’ she said.

  ‘Sister Ignatius asked me about the letter and the poem. I didn’t want you to get into trouble so I said I wrote them, that it was a crush, just a crush I had, and he hadn’t done anything wrong. I was worried that you were both going to be caught. . .’

  She didn’t speak for a moment, just went back to staring at the fire.

  ‘You said you wrote it to protect me,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Yes, and him,’ I said, an ember of hope burning in me.

  She looked at me, alert, when I mentioned him.

  Please, please understand.

  ‘But I wanted it to be found,’ she said. ‘I wanted everyone to know. I wanted them to know that he wanted me and they couldn’t have him, that Helen couldn’t have him.’

  This was not what she was supposed to say. She spoke as if it was a game. That lives weren’t going to be changed.

  ‘Do you love him?’ she said, looking at me.

  I felt stunned momentarily. I could not think of an answer to this. She didn’t know me at all. It was astonishing and couldn’t be true.

  I shook my head vigorously. Again, she reminded me of a child, like she had on the stairs weeks ago, when she had asked me who my favourite author was. It was sort of a jolting lack of self-consciousness, or consideration for context.

  ‘No, of course not,’ I said. ‘It’s not him I love, it’s. . .’

  The words wouldn’t come.

  ‘Why did you ask him if we were running away then? Did you want him to stay? Do you want him for yourself?’ Her voice was harsh.

  She got up suddenly, nearly kicking me in her haste, and picked up a poker at the edge of the fireplace and began stoking the fire. Some sparks spat out on to the rug and she stepped on them, twisting her foot into the material. I moved back from the fire and sat on the chair opposite.

  ‘You are really important to him, Victoria, but I don’t think he meant to encourage you, to make you think that he was going to leave everything and run away with you,’ I said.

  She turned, her back to the fire, putting her face in shadow again.

  ‘He was lying to you, Louisa, can’t you even tell? Don’t you know anything about him?’ she said. ‘He didn’t want you to get into trouble, to have to lie for us, that’s why he said that to you. Now he’s gone, left everything. Isn’t that evidence enough? He’s gone to set things up, get them ready. We are going to Morocco.’

  She looked to the window then. As if another country lay out there in the dark of the garden.

  ‘He’s gone, Victoria, because he is in trouble; they are suspicious of him and don’t want any scandal. They fired him,’ I said.

  It felt like our script had gone astray. We were reading different lines, the roles diverging.

  She walked over to me, grabbed my arm and pulled me out of the kitchen and into the dark hall. She pushed open another door off the narrow hallway. Lit only by moonlight, it was a bedroom, a large, sheetless brass bed in the centre of the room. As my eyes got used to the dark I could make out a tall mahogany wardrobe against one of the walls, the door hanging open and all the clothes gone.

  ‘I have been here, with him. In that bed,’ she said, pointing at it.

  I didn’t want to hear. I felt a pain in my head and things slipping away, dissolving again.

  ‘Maybe we should go, get back to school. Your parents are waiting for you,’ I said, ‘and I believe you, of course I do. I was only trying to protect you and him, that’s why I said I wrote it. I knew, I knew you would need this time to lie low. And even when he said you weren’t going to run away together, I thought he was probably just pretending.’

  I lied and knew there was an air of desperation coming off me. But I was afraid of her there, in the moonlit room. I could feel a sickness in her. Did she not even remember telling me they hadn’t been together? That she was waiting?

  ‘You were never a good liar,’ she said, pacing around the room. ‘You keep contradicting yourself: you believe me, you don’t; you believe Helen, then you don’t. I don’t know how I could have trusted you; I th
ought you were different.’

  She looked disdainfully at me, the way Helen did. I was small and insignificant.

  ‘This week has just been like this weird parallel world, where nothing seems like it should be. Two of the most important people to me have just disappeared and I’ve realized something, something important that. . .’ I stopped.

  We stared at each other for a moment.

  Say it, tell her.

  She sat then on the side of the bed for a second before lying down across it. And the moment was gone. And it was hopeless anyway. Her anger was a barrier to me.

  ‘Don’t you want to ask me about it?’ she said, looking up at the ceiling. ‘What it felt like, to be with him.’

  The pain in my head travelled downwards, inflaming my neck and resting finally on my chest.

  ‘The first time, I cried. I felt like I had given him something, something that was never going to come back and I would never be the same again,’ she said.

  He was there then, beside us. A spirit of passion and possibility. Enticing us. I could smell the smoke and the peat of the summer house. The glow of him.

  I bowed my head.

  ‘But after that, it was me who wanted more. We even did it at the swimming hole, in the grass, just before term began. . .’

  I raised my eyes then, remembered the walk that first week, the three of us, and how she had said she hadn’t been there in ages.

  ‘If you loved him, why did you write the note?’ I said.

  The fact, the truth that could not be played away. Maybe it might anchor her, bring her back.

  ‘Because, I told you, he was getting nervous about me, and whether I might back out. He wanted to save me from any trouble, or scandal. Just like you, really,’ she said. ‘I had to make him see. There needed to be something, something to show him the extent of my feelings. I wanted him to know that I would burn everything down. That I was willing to do that, that nothing matters except him.’

  She sat up then. And she looked curious. Her eyes wide, the brows raised.

  ‘You know, the two of you are kind of alike. He thinks so, he thinks you are lost. And he’s lost. He told me he thinks about you, worries about you,’ she said. ‘It nearly made me angry, like I was about Helen, but then I realized, it’s just who he is, he can’t help opening up to people. He can see into their souls. I believe that now. He would never love someone like you.’

  I could not be loved. And there was a part of me that agreed with her. That always agreed with her. I hung my head again.

  ‘It will all work out, though, you know,’ she said. ‘It always does, you can’t run from your fate. He is going to send for me, and we will forget all of this ever happened. Forget you, even. Because it was fate, the day in the hallway when he walked in.’ She looked up at me then, noticed me backing out the door.

  There is a chance that a feeling once felt will never leave you. Hearts are stronger than minds.

  ‘We need to go back,’ I said.

  She was not herself and it scared me. The silence, the melancholy that I had pretended, imagined was something else. I saw it now. A part of her kept slipping away, drifting; she couldn’t control it. She was a fantasy. And I felt like I had that evening in her house, like I could see us from somewhere else, a jump cut in reality. A moment so important that it escapes out and away from the normal flow of time.

  She got up from the bed and followed me back to the kitchen.

  I would never tell. I could never tell her.

  My love was a false and dark thing. Of dreams and the night.

  I left the house and walked to the front of the cottage. I wasn’t sure if she would follow me, but she did. The folder that had been on the table was under her arm. The light was still burning over the front door. I thought about going back in to switch it off but I didn’t want to return. It had felt dead in there.

  I cycled slowly, her weight heavy in front of me, partially blocking my view of the dark road back to Temple House. There was almost no wind, just the vague smell of smoke in the distance. There was no mist. The road ahead was clear.

  We said very little. My heart was on fire. She had given hers away.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  As I walked through the dark woods to the summer house on my last night there, I thought about not being loved. I regret that now. I could have done better. My life, short as it was, deserved better reflection and consideration than that. There had been more to it, I think.

  If I had known that it would be the last night, what might I have done? Run far away from Temple House, demanded a different fate?

  Might I have told my parents that their not loving each other did matter? We had once been a family.

  Or should I have simply lain on the wet grass, looked up at the stars, lit a cigarette, and marvelled at the mystery of it all? At how it made no sense and then just did. At how there were rules to existence, principles underlying things, but you never saw them, or understood what they meant until it was too late.

  And ranked my loves. I might have done that. The list that had no people on it whatsoever, for they were too disappointing. And loving them was simply too painful.

  I knew, as I cycled away from his cottage, that I was back to the beginning, becoming the person I was before. The one who was never seen. It was there in the silence of the black trees and sky around us. The familiar, a reversion. The unseen once again. And I felt something hard settle inside me; something that had been fluid before was now solid. And it would never change again.

  We arrived back at the school close to 6 p.m. The grounds were empty of all the visitors and the line of stalls and cars resembled something from a ghost fair. A few flags and white sheets on the tables were blowing in the light breeze. It looked like a place where the fun had suddenly stopped.

  The lights were burning in the windows and we could hear the choir practising for their performance at the concert the next day. Victoria’s parents’ car was still parked at the side of the house.

  Once off the bike, she looked tired and drained, the bravado and confidence of the cottage weakened slightly.

  Maybe reality had emerged for her too on the ride home in the dark. The real world, of rules and consequences. But I doubted it.

  I leaned the bike back up from where I had taken it earlier.

  ‘You need to go in, Victoria. It will only be worse if you don’t,’ I said.

  I could hear my voice, weak and spent, as if it was coming from far away.

  Where was irony now when we needed her most? All shields were gone, all masks removed. No protection.

  ‘You don’t know how it feels to want something you can’t have,’ she shouted at me.

  And I knew that the understanding I thought we shared was just another of my illusions. Another of the things I made up to get through the day. And I felt sure I would never be close to anyone again. Intimacy was a dream.

  ‘Victoria, I am in trouble too, I need to go in,’ I said. ‘They are probably looking for me. I need to just face it and get it over with.’

  The stoic me. The tenacious, sane me.

  ‘Fine,’ she said, ‘but when you hear about me, find out what I do to myself, you will be sorry. You won’t be able to live with yourself.’

  I felt like grabbing her, shaking her. I wanted to wake her up.

  ‘I did it for you,’ I said. ‘I got myself into trouble, for you. You wanted loyalty, you wanted us the same. I did that, I tried to become you. Can’t you even see that?’

  I knew she wasn’t listening, not because she was cruel but because she just couldn’t hear me, or anyone. She cared for no one but herself and Mr Lavelle.

  She too was selfish in her love.

  She said nothing but walked off into the dark, in that haughty way she had. Her shoulders straight and I’m sure her eyebrows raised. I watched her back for a second, disappearing off towards the gloom of the playing fields and the coastal path that eventually wound round to the summer house.


  I opened the heavy front door of the school, which was still unlocked.

  The smell of lemon. One of the cleaning ladies was in the hallway, kneeling on the floor. She didn’t look up as I walked in. The choir were singing ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’. We would be expected in church soon.

  As I stood there, the silent woman continued cleaning almost at my feet.

  If something about me was an error that could not be fixed, why was I staying?

  All Victoria’s talk of running away, when all along it was me.

  I was the one who was supposed to leave.

  I walked down the steps of the school and took the shortcut through the walled garden rather than follow Victoria directly. I was careful to stay in the shadows, avoiding any lit windows, as I did so. I didn’t think I was looking for her. But I suppose I was, really.

  The summer house had a small lamp on inside but when I looked in the door there was no one there. I always ended up here: the place you could walk away from but never escape. You would always return to its door. Like a limitless maze. The cabinet was locked and forlorn. I thought about breaking the glass and taking my skull. I had earned it.

  I took some throws down from the shelf and began making a bed on the couch. I would call my parents from the phone box in the village in the morning. They would understand eventually. I could move to the town house with my mother, start in a new school. I would downgrade my aspirations, make them neat, not take up too much space with them. The lesson learned. I took off the locket Victoria had given me and laid it on the small table.

  The door opened. It was Mr Lavelle. He was wrapped in a long grey coat, like something from an old army store.

  ‘Louisa,’ he said. ‘I came to get some things, to find something, but. . .’

  He looked around the room, a vaguely bewildered expression on his face.

  ‘Are you looking for the picture? The picture you did of Helen? If so, she was here already. She beat you to it,’ I said.

  He looked startled; his eyes were large and liquid in the low light.

  It was the hardness in me speaking. I needed to be cruel to someone.