The Temple House Vanishing

by Rachel Donohue

  ‘Louisa, please don’t be angry,’ he said, stepping towards me.

  ‘Do you enjoy making people love you?’ I said. ‘Pretending they are special when it’s all a game, not real?’

  I was talking to him but also to Victoria.

  He sat down on the couch then and held his head in his hands.

  ‘I didn’t do anything. I have spent the last two hours explaining this to. . .’ His voice failed. ‘I told you I didn’t feel that way about her, you know that,’ he said, looking up at me.

  ‘Why are you even here?’ I said, sitting beside him.

  ‘I had a last meeting. I’ll be leaving tonight. And I won’t be teaching here again,’ he said. ‘I tried to explain the letter was not from you, that it was from Victoria and that she has been pursuing me, but I don’t think they believe me. It’s such a mess. I just wanted to. . . make you, all of you, think well of me. I needed this job.’ He shook his head, and looked at the floor again.

  He seemed pathetic to me then. Where was the castle and the yacht, the poetry?

  He raised his head; there was fear in his eyes. ‘They are monsters here,’ he said.

  There were monsters in all of us.

  We said nothing for a minute. He turned to look at the empty grate of the stove. I looked at his profile. The movie star in the wrong show.

  ‘Are you camping out?’ he said softly, trying to smile, his gaze moving back to the couch and the throws.

  I nodded.

  ‘Where will you go?’ I asked, leaning my head back.

  ‘I’m not sure – far away,’ he said.

  He took my hand. ‘It’s a child’s hand,’ he said. ‘So small.’

  We were barely grown. Victoria and I.

  ‘Thank you for trying to say it wasn’t from me, the letter,’ I said.

  The tiredness I had felt in the cottage was back. He stayed holding my hand, staring at the stove. Where the fire should have been.

  ‘You know she loves you, really loves you, Victoria,’ I said.

  Maybe I thought it would make him feel better.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  He turned to look at me and for once I could meet his eyes.

  We heard a noise at the door, felt the breeze enter the room and looked over. It was Victoria. She seemed dazed. He dropped my hand and stood up immediately.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she said, her face red and raw.

  He didn’t respond but just stayed staring at her.

  She turned slightly to look at me. And I thought of how it was the opposite of that first day. All recognition gone. We were strangers.

  I got up and moved towards her.

  I noticed her glance to the bed made up on the couch.

  She stepped out the door then, into the darkness. She was shouting angry words at some mystery assailant into the night. We could hear her.

  Mr Lavelle stayed still a moment.

  ‘You need to follow her, find her, help her,’ I said loudly, looking at him.

  Be the hero, that’s what she wanted from him. And it was how he always wanted to be seen.

  He looked vaguely surprised at the suggestion.

  ‘She could hurt herself!’ I said, gesturing to the door.

  He still didn’t move.

  ‘She’s not well, she’s confused,’ I said, staring at him.

  He nodded then. ‘No, she isn’t well.’ He pulled the collar of his coat up.

  ‘And what do you think might have made her that way?’ I said.

  He looked down for a second, at the floor, before returning my gaze.

  ‘Come with me to find her,’ I said, more desperate now.

  ‘She needs to learn to live without me, she needs time to get better,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, I know, but she’s not able to. Help me get her back to school and to her parents. Then you can disappear,’ I said.

  I will pick up the pieces, I felt like saying. After you have tired of it all and run away, I will mind her. Despite everything.

  ‘I didn’t. . . nothing happened between us,’ he said. ‘You do believe me?’

  The pleading to want us to love him.

  Fear when he realized we did.

  ‘I don’t know any more,’ I said.

  And I didn’t know. Anything.

  He shrugged his shoulders and I thought it meant he agreed so I walked past him out into the night.

  She had gone into the woods that led to the top of the cliff. I could hear her shouting in the distance, fading in and out. I ran after her and for a few seconds I didn’t look back. I just presumed he was behind me. It was only after I was well into the middle of the woods that I turned around, out of breath, and realized he hadn’t come. No sound. There was no one there.

  I walked on, slipping every now and then on the damp pine needles or tripping over a branch. I was in a dream world of shadows and fear, where behind every rock or bush there waited something desperate to take me. I thought of the collector, the one who owned the cabinet, and how he was supposed to have hanged himself in the woods. I imagined his body, decayed and rotting, dangling from one of the branches that touched my face. I would not have done it for anyone else, run into the woods in the dark. Only for her.

  Her anger was my guide and I imagined her words left a trail of sharp pieces of glass on the forest floor. They would cut me if I wasn’t careful.

  When I reached the other side of the woods and emerged out on the cliff, she was nowhere in sight. I felt such relief to be away from the trees and the shadows that for a moment I just stared out to the sea, the sky clear, a sprinkling of stars. It was much colder here, as always; the moon pale and only partly visible. A waxing crescent.

  I could not see or hear her but knew where she had gone. The swimming hole. Because that was the day when everything had seemed perfect. I remembered the sun as we walked through the woods that afternoon, and the air of celestial magnificence. The luxury and glamour of it, like a dream now. And the story that I wrote about it. The statues in the wood. Condemned to stand side by side, never able to see the other.

  I pushed my way through the gorse bushes, scratching my arms, and found the path; the ‘Hazard’ sign buried under the leaves grazed my ankle and cut it. I reached down and could feel blood. There was no pain, though. My breath was heavy and it was difficult to hold my balance. The ground was slippy, large stones poking out from the undergrowth. The steps must be here soon, I thought. Everything felt sharp and rough.

  I would bring her back, and it would all be over soon. I would tell her there was no shame in loving someone who didn’t love you. I should know. Some people were not meant to be together. They weren’t good for each other. They cancelled each other out. And everything that once was good became twisted.

  I made my way down the broken steps, edging slowly to where I knew she must be. Sitting there in the dark, the sea far below. I thought about her friend, the one from before, the one she was going to run away with. I wasn’t good enough. I hadn’t been enough. There was something about me that made people not want me.

  I made it to the bottom of the steps and lowered myself to the narrow shelf of cliff where I knew the swimming hole was. All rotting and rusted in the moonlight.

  Victoria was a lean shadow facing out to the sea. The sky seemed bigger here, on the ledge. An expanse of black velvet shot through with stars.

  The sea was a low, rhythmic hush in the dark below us. She turned.

  ‘I thought he would come,’ she said, shivering. ‘I thought he would follow me.’

  She didn’t seem surprised that it was me.

  ‘He can’t; he wanted to, but I made him go. He has to leave the school.’

  She turned away and went back to looking at the sea. I walked over to her. The edge of the cliff a foot or so in front of us. And for a second I thought she was a ghost, like she had gone already and I was just seeing her shadow.

  ‘You made him go,’ she said under her breath.

  ‘Co
me back with me, Victoria,’ I said.

  And I meant it.

  ‘To what?’ she said. ‘There is nothing left. It’s happened before.’

  ‘It mightn’t be like that,’ I whispered. ‘Just a new school, a new start, away from him. He confused things, he played around, and it wasn’t fair. He should have known better.’

  She looked at me then. She was mesmerizing again. The girl whose imagination had been too vivid. Her body was shaking more visibly now, her arms crossed, holding her together.

  ‘Why didn’t he want me?’ she said.

  I wanted to say: I forgive you almost anything. And you don’t need him. He is just a bit player and our lives are bigger than that. We can still go to Morocco and smoke thin cigarettes on a veranda and you will write a book about living without love or favour and I can paint pictures of the desert, and something else, something new, will take the place of this pain. And we will put the shame behind us.

  And he doesn’t matter.

  I do.

  It was what I wanted to tell her that first day, in the summer house.

  That I never felt anything but whole when she was near.

  She was shivering and pale. A part of her gone, and the cold getting in.

  Her eyes were huge and filled with moonlight.

  I saw her raise her arm and I thought to myself she will hold me now. She is so cold and I will warm her.

  And in the future we will be ironic about it all.

  When we have lives that are different.

  We will remember this night, and think how foolish we once were.

  I moved closer to her. I wanted her then. I would always want her, and it wasn’t her mind, but all of her. She made me better.

  She didn’t take a breath or turn away, but just looked at me like she had never seen me before. Like I was a vision of something she didn’t particularly want to see.

  ‘You wanted him all along,’ she whispered, her breath uneven in the cold air.

  It was spoken like it was a truth she had long understood.

  And then she struck me, hard and fast, across the cheek.

  I saw her look at me with something resembling pleasure, as if someone else had to feel her pain.

  I lost my balance and fell. And she didn’t try and catch me.

  I fell backwards into the night and on to the rocks on the ledge that was half hidden below. There was light, sharp and harsh. And noise, like a rush of voices in my ear.

  My head hurt and then it didn’t any more.

  She stayed looking at me.

  She spoke to the stars of my jealousy. And how some people could just never be happy for anyone else. It was not in their nature. She stretched her hands out into the dark, and they were not pleading for forgiveness but for him to return. But there was no one there and she knew it. He would never answer her call.

  The universe was empty.

  Except for me.

  Then she kicked dirt over the ledge on to my body and walked away, back to the dark woods.

  The Journalist

  Chapter Thirty

  I stopped the car around the corner from her office. We had barely spoken the whole way back. Victoria cried for most of the time. I didn’t attempt to comfort her or ask any more questions. I kept looking straight ahead, the road the only thing that mattered. My phone lay between us in the car like a conscience, flickering to life every now and then.

  She sat there for a minute when we got back to the city, her hand on the door, eventually opening it. We didn’t say goodbye. I watched her walk away, her back slightly hunched against the rain, through the grey, wet street to her office, her home of steel and glass. A rubbish bin was overflowing on the path, and she had to weave her way past decaying sandwiches and rotten vegetables. A large black crow was perched on the roof of the shop as she passed, looking down at the spoils. It was strangely fitting. I felt no relief.

  I let her go. I might have dragged her to a police station. I didn’t. Shock, fear, a sense of unwanted responsibility maybe prevented me. I had shouted I would be calling the authorities. It was the first thing I had said when she led me to the edge of the cliff. And she had looked relieved, almost grateful that the decision was no longer hers. Yet I didn’t call. Minutes passed, the evening darkened, and I just sat there. The instinct to watch, to document the lives of others, stronger in me perhaps than anything else. I would call them later that night or early tomorrow. I trusted Victoria, and I knew she wanted it over. We would both face it all tomorrow.

  I scrolled through the pictures of the school I had taken earlier. The empty house, and the cliffside where Louisa had lain, broken and alone all these years.

  The orphan.

  I opened the article on my laptop that was due to run the next day on Lavelle. I typed a new ending, one that would not reveal all yet, but toned down any sense of the pair having run away. Subtly erasing the notion that teacher and student ever had an inappropriate relationship, or that he had killed her. It was ambiguous and not my best work, but it would do. I wrote then a short line under it, saying the series would be concluding in the following days.

  The heading should read – Louisa died for someone else’s passion, another person’s greed. But I don’t get to write the headings. I emailed the revisions to my editor.

  I looked at the photo that was going to run with it, the one that Victoria had sent me, the one of Lavelle leaning against the car. I wondered where he had gone and why he had never come back to say he had seen them that night in the summer house. It could have made all the difference. Victoria might have been implicated then. They could have found the body.

  Strange and elusive, a hollow man after all.

  I stayed sitting in the car, and rang my mum. She was making dinner for herself; there was the clash of pots and a kettle whistling. I asked her if I could come over, stay the night. She said nothing for a minute and I could see her, standing in her tiny kitchen, staring at the rain on the windows, worrying. I knew she would then, having caught sight of herself in the glass, stand more upright, shoulders back, before saying in a soft voice: ‘Of course, that would be lovely. I will make up the bed.’

  I needed to go home.

  When I arrived at my mother’s house there was a note on the fridge. It was her bridge night and she would be back later. I was exhausted and went to bed.

  I dreamed of Louisa. She was standing in the hallway outside Victoria’s office and people, lots of them, were crowding past her and up the steps that led to the roof garden. She looked tiny compared to them, and pale, and she was wearing that T-shirt, the one that said ‘Enjoy the Silence’. She was mouthing words at me but I could hear nothing. After trying and failing to tell me something, she took a last look at me, then bowed her head and followed the others up the narrow steps.

  I woke and it was 3 a.m. I thought about texting Victoria, even grabbed my phone and started typing. I was worried she would say I had made it all up or that she would run away. But then I decided against it. Nothing could be done until later and so I tried to find sleep again. But it was useless, I turned from side to side. Images of Louisa and the school coming and going in my head. I would ring Victoria early, then alert the police.

  I sat up in bed and looked around my room. It had not changed much since I had left at nineteen. The white dressing table with the pink curtains covering the legs, giving it a look of some modesty. I had inherited it from a cousin and used to hide my journals under the curtains. Spanish dolls in elaborate, colourful dresses were lined up on the table part of it, still in their boxes, and perfume bottles, empty now, the scent long since evaporated. And some nail polish, bright candy colours.

  The things you leave behind. The things that don’t fit you any more. That you run away from.

  I went to the window, pulled open the curtains and looked across the street to Louisa’s house. There was a light on over the front door. New people lived there now.

  I went downstairs and made warm milk with a genero
us helping of whiskey in it. I opened my laptop and started to describe the journey to Temple House with Victoria, the emptiness and the sense of desolation as we climbed down the steps to the swimming hole. The smell of decaying undergrowth, the slippery rocks and the rotting, strange sight of the pool, rusting and with leaves and creepers growing over it. A mausoleum to something, something from long before. A fantasy that had gone wrong.

  I described Victoria, leading me to the edge of the cliff and saying, ‘She is there because he always seemed to understand her.’ And it made her cry with rage. And how she told me that she had left the skull from the cabinet and a heart-shaped locket on the ledge, and then she got on her hands and knees in the dirt looking for them but there was nothing to find. And I had to turn away then.

  And how she kept saying, Louisa follows me everywhere.

  I didn’t hear my mother enter the room until she was beside me. I was far away. She had her thin red dressing gown around her and sat down at the table. Her face in the low blue light was lined and drawn. I spoke first.

  ‘I found her,’ I said.

  She looked alarmed, and rubbed her forehead with her hand before placing it on her chin the way that she did when she was worried.

  ‘I found her,’ I said again.

  ‘She’s not lost any more then,’ she said, reaching out to touch my arm, and she did a sign of the cross.

  ‘No, she’s not,’ I said.

  ‘Can you tell me what happened?’ she whispered.

  ‘Victoria, it was Victoria. Her friend. . .’ I said.

  She breathed in sharply.

  ‘And the teacher?’

  ‘No one knows,’ I said.

  ‘Louisa’s mother,’ she said then and bowed her head, ‘her father.’

  I saw him: shabby clothes, overweight, dragging the bins in.

  And me afraid of his sadness and what it meant.

  That things that shouldn’t happen sometimes did.

  My mother and I didn’t speak much after that.

  I looked at my watch: five thirty. I would ring Victoria soon.

  She was expecting me.

  Epilogue