The Temple House Vanishing Read online

  Published in Great Britain in 2020 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © Rachel Donohue, 2020

  The moral right of Rachel Donohue to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Hardback ISBN: 978 1 78649 938 7

  Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 83895 024 8

  E-book ISBN: 978 1 78649 940 0

  Printed in Great Britain

  Corvus

  An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

  Ormond House

  26–27 Boswell Street

  London

  WC1N 3JZ

  www.corvus-books.co.uk

  To Ger, Ava and Charlotte.

  We had fed the heart on fantasies,

  The heart’s grown brutal from the fare;

  More substance in our enmities

  Than in our love…

  W.B. Yeats, ‘The Stare’s Nest by my Window’

  Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way,

  which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.

  Matthew 7:14

  Prologue

  The Journalist

  I picture Victoria standing at the window of her office high above the city that morning. The face that must have once been lovely reflected in the dark glass, tired and wasted now. She holds the phone out from her, like it is a tasteless thing. My voice at the other end echoes into the bare room. The boxes stacked; shelves cleared.

  I know there is a newspaper on her desk. They are delivered early to her floor. And that he, Mr Lavelle, is staring at her from the corner of page five, with my words underneath. He is like a spectre from the past, leaning against the bonnet of a car, his fair head looking slightly away from the camera, eyebrows raised. He looks dishevelled for a teacher, the collar of his tweed coat tilted up, the face unshaven. But beautiful, there is no doubting that. It’s there in the symmetry of the bones and the evenness of the gaze. A sort of luminous quality to him. A face you would stop to look at, remember.

  I think about how long she must have spent staring at the picture. And what it meant.

  But Victoria didn’t want to talk to me any more about him, or Louisa. She said nothing mattered much now. Her voice flat and listless. And this, in a strange way, was true. It was the end, not the beginning. The future, like the past, was already set. She hung up the phone then. She had no need for my intrusions any more.

  I sat for a while on the edge of my bed. The early-morning light leaking in under the curtains. A weary, sleepless, draining night just gone. Victoria was leaving it all up to me. The responsibility of telling another’s story. And it didn’t surprise me.

  It was reported afterwards that she cancelled her meetings for the rest of the week. She also deleted files and ordered flowers for her mother. No one, however, noticed anything particularly odd about her behaviour. She passed through the beige rituals of that day as she did every other.

  A colleague was quoted as saying she ate lunch alone at her desk, and that this was not unusual.

  Another said that Victoria had looked like she was bored or distracted at their last meeting. The sky outside of the window that evening seemed to catch her attention more than the conversation within. Several times she apologized for having lost her way in the discussion and checked her mobile.

  But this was not an ordinary day. It had not been an ordinary life.

  When the office emptied that evening, Victoria climbed the narrow stairs to the roof garden ten storeys high.

  The garden where clients were entertained in the summer and junior associates were plied with free drink and promised opportunities for greatness.

  A place where in the past I’m sure she had stood silently in the evening sun, waiting for the appropriate moment to leave.

  The roof garden where you might walk to the edge of the building and pit the force of your life and all its glassy achievements against the strength of your desire to experience a fall.

  The place where Victoria chose to take off her shoes, climb over the low, neat, box hedge that served as a barrier and then jump, unseen into the dark night.

  A silent, resolute descent.

  I imagine she thought about Louisa. But then, I will never know.

  She remained conscious of reputation to the end. She fell not to the front, where she might have crashed through the shiny white atrium and on to the expensive Italian marble tiles, but to the back of the building, where there are bike racks, and the ground is littered with cigarette butts. Where Security wouldn’t find her until the morning.

  I know this because I went to see it for myself, the place where she fell. I stood behind the police line and looked up at the grey sky.

  And I thought of Mr Lavelle and how once, when Louisa and Victoria were young, he had told them the fates might choose to come to the rescue of a hero.

  But he had been wrong. I should have told her that.

  There are no heroes in this story.

  Louisa

  Chapter One

  I dream of it still, the school by the sea. It’s always that first September day that returns. My legs warm and sticking to the plastic seats of the car. The radio drifting in and out of coverage. My parents awkward in their Sunday best. The half-opened map lying on the dashboard, slipping off every now and then. No one speaking.

  Finally, the black sign for Temple House hanging off a crumbling granite pillar. My father turning slowly through the rusting, wrought-iron gates and up the winding, gravel driveway. The light more green than gold now, soft and low under the tall trees. The sense of hush as we finally emerge from shade to the edge of the cliffs, the sky stretching in front of us. The drive is narrow and sandy here, a sense of journey’s end. I press my head to the cool glass, my curiosity like a fever. My suitcase and all that it signifies beside me on the seat. I open the window, strain my neck but can’t see below to the waves, only sky and white birds. The air cool on my face.

  Am I happy? I can’t remember now.

  A thin film of dust or sand is thrown up and smears the windscreen. The drive swerves away from the coast, the path is more uneven. We pass between tall, thick yew trees, a last gateway, before a green lawn opens in front of us. The cliffs fenced off with a small warning sign. There is a large pond, leaves and dirt gathering in the corners of the pale water, and beyond this, net-less tennis courts locked up since summer term ended.

  In my dream, Temple House, in all its Victorian, turreted austerity, emerges from a mist but this must surely be a trick of memory. Though in truth, that winter of 1990, it did have its own climate. Even the sunniest of days elsewhere could be grey and dull there due to its exposed position high above the sea. There are girls, certainly, standing on the wide granite steps waiting to greet the new students. The prefects. Their long hair and black cloaks flapping in the wind as they wait to welcome us. There is a nun behind them in the deep, arched porch. She is ticking off the list of new students. The fourth-year scholarship girls arriving the Sunday after term begins.


  I step from the car to the smell of seaweed that blows in from the beach. The air salty and colder, suddenly it seems, than September should allow. The car door is whipped from my hand and slams. The house looms over us. It is red brick, three storeys tall, with large windows, their frames painted a deep green. Thick ivy reaches up to touch the lower sills. One side of the house is shaped like a tower and protrudes forcefully from the rest of the building. The windows look dark in the early-evening light, shades pulled low, giving it a subdued, half-eyed gaze.

  As we ascend the steps I look upwards. There are three girls watching us arrive from a large, arched window on the second floor. They are framed in an edging of stained glass and are standing in what I would come to understand was the Maiden’s Chamber. The turn in the stairs.

  The dream always ends here.

  I know we, the scholarship girls, were greeted by the nun with the list, Sister Ignatius. She was a small, dainty woman, dressed in the navy and black habit of the order. Quietly spoken, she shook my parents’ hands, directing us through the porch to a sitting room on the left of the hall where there were refreshments. There was an air of curt efficiency about her. Nothing wasted in her movements. As I walked past I glanced at her profile, she looked like a silent bird of prey. It might have been her nose, which was slightly beaked, and the way she had of turning her head very slowly. Her face was white, chalk white, and fine boned. I understood when you became a nun you took a different name. I wondered did any of them mind doing this, or were they just like the other women, like my mother who took my father’s name when she married and pretended to be happy. All their old selves forgotten, packed away along with their records and books.

  We entered a hallway, dark wood panelling on the walls and polished orange and black tiles on the floor, the pattern in the shape of a spiral. There was a smell of pine and lemon and behind that, very faintly, meat. A room off the hall had a sign on the door: ‘Visitors’. We entered and one of the prefects, without speaking, poured tea into china cups. She had long, fair hair and around her neck there was a small silver cross on a chain. It dangled down as she leaned over the teapot. After pouring it she left the cups on the table and sat by the window, her head turned from us.

  The room itself was large, brighter than the hall, with a high ceiling and the walls were painted a pale green. They were bare except for a large portrait of a nun and a crucifix. The floor was covered with linoleum, also green, and in places there were slight rips.

  The prefect said nothing and stared out to the sea.

  Eventually, the two other scholarship girls and their families joined us, along with Sister Ignatius. We stared silently and morosely at each other across the table. One of the girls kept biting her nails. The other hunched her shoulders in the chair and looked like she might cry. After a summer of shorts and T-shirts, my uniform felt itchy and constrictive. Sister Ignatius spoke a few words of welcome but so quietly and with such economy it was nearly impossible to hear. She barely opened her mouth, her lips were thin, tight.

  My father almost slipped off the couch in his attempts to lean in and listen. My mother looked dazed and slightly confused as to how we had ended up here. She had also worn too much make-up and looked out of place, desperate somehow. Not that the other mothers looked much better; one woman wore a white tracksuit top. We looked cheap and our insecurities made us act as if we were suspicious of each other. Furtive. After some moments of awkward silence, Sister Ignatius clapped her hands gently, like an emperor whose quiet but insistent whims must be met. The prefect jumped to her feet. Awake again.

  I don’t remember if I hugged my parents as we said goodbye, but I imagine not. It wasn’t our thing.

  It has stayed with me for another reason too. That day. It was the first time I saw a dead body. After our parents left, the prefects led us to a small cloakroom off the hall where we dropped our bags. One of the girls addressed the group, telling us a nun, Sister Josephine, had died the night before and was laid out in the school’s small church. The girl who spoke had dark red hair caught in a bun, and pale skin. Her eyes were grey and large. Her name was Helen. We walked behind her, down a long corridor with a polished parquet floor. The walls were lined with framed photographs – the hockey team of 1962, the debating team of 1979, the graduation ball of 1985. All of the faces frozen in time, with awkward smiles and bad hairstyles.

  The church was accessed through a heavy door, which I would later learn led to the nuns’ quarters. It was dark after the fluorescent lights of the hallway and it took a second for my eyes to get used to the gloom. It was tiny, like a church designed for a doll’s house. It was lit by tall, white candles, laid out all around the altar, and the whole space smelt strongly of the same lemon polish of the other rooms. There were only eight pews in total. The altar, carved out of white marble with a vein of dark pink running through it, seemed too large.

  The nun was laid out in an open coffin with thick cream satin lining the inside. The prefects led us to the front row and indicated that we should kneel. I was last into the pew and so my head was level with the dead nun. I could feel her pale, silent presence out of the corner of my eye. We all went on our knees, heads bowed. What prayer might I have said? ‘Oh Lord, don’t forsake me’ possibly. Is that even a prayer? I find all the words and incantations that we repeated are gone now. Dissolved.

  We stayed there in silence for what seemed like an age but was probably only five minutes. I was to get used to the sense of time suspended when you entered the church. The girls around me shifted uncomfortably. One stuck her fingernail into the centre of her palm and was slowly twisting it deeper into the skin, another was breathing quickly, short, tight breaths. Like her heart was shuddering.

  As we got up to leave, I looked at the deceased nun fullon. Her hands were clasped together on her chest. She was holding a large wooden rosary, the crucifix intertwined between her wrinkled fingers. Her face, unlike her hands, was mostly unlined, taut, and a few strands of grey hair were visible under the wimple. She didn’t look asleep, as I thought dead people might, but empty, like a hollow doll. It was the gap the soul left when it transcended to God. You weren’t really a person any more. Just a vessel, vacated. I had read about this.

  One of the other new girls said she felt unwell and two of the prefects led her out. There was always one. The prefects put their arms around her shoulders, smiles of satisfaction on their faces, as if this had been the appropriate response and the plan had worked. Find the hysteric. The rest of us trailed out behind them, tracing our steps back along the corridor. The girls staring out at us in the photos on the walls seemed more sympathetic to me now, like we had shared in some initiation.

  Afterwards, we were brought to our rooms. We dragged our bags up the stairs, passing under the large window above the stairwell where the three girls had watched our arrival, panels of blue and red light reflected on the floor. The wallpaper was salmon-coloured and textured but in places mottled and peeling, as if the sea air was seeping through. The stairs to the third floor were narrow, less grand. My room was spacious, with a window that overlooked the forest that lay at the edge of the school grounds. I would learn later that the rooms with sea views went to the girls whose parents made donations to the school. There was a small bookcase and a desk beside my bed. The walls were white and empty, bar a crucifix that hung above the door and a large photograph of a nun holding a chalice. It was one of those pictures that was originally black and white but looked like it had been coloured in by crayon. The chalice was a gleaming yellow and her eyes an unnatural blue.

  I was to share with a girl from the year ahead of me, Alice. As I unpacked my case she entered the room and sat on her bed. She was tall and broad, fresh-faced, her hair fair and curly. She immediately asked me what subjects I was taking and had I ever boarded before. I asked her where the other students were; the house was eerily quiet. She seemed not to hear me and began brushing her hair. I thought we might be due back downstairs that evening for a
talk with Sister Ignatius and a chance to meet others from my class. Alice indicated no, we were to stay in our room and she would help me get settled. After all, I must be tired.

  She told me then that the ‘drama’ girl in the chapel had apparently thought she saw the eyelids of the nun quiver as she lay in her coffin. I hung up my few clothes and laughed along with her at the girl’s stupidity. We didn’t speak much after this. But later that night, when the lights went out and Alice was asleep, I lay there thinking about resurrection and how it might be the worst thing ever. You don’t want to see the dead rise, no matter how much you might miss them. That first night in the hard, narrow bed was long. By midnight all I could think of was the nun climbing out of her coffin and walking the corridors in search of her missing soul. Her rosary beads dragging along the floor behind her.

  It began with death, my time in Temple House.

  Chapter Two

  Of course we were all bored. Bored and in search of meaning.

  I have tried to remember who I was that autumn and winter of 1990, what was my defining feature. Maybe there was nothing that distinguished me, and that in itself could possibly be the answer. I do know I wanted to be seen as different, special. But then, doesn’t everyone?

  I try not to analyse my past. I mostly choose to actively fake my existence. To reinvent it as something different, something I have only a casual interest in. It is how I cope. On my last day at the school, lying in the grass, with the sea below me, I stitched the undamaged bits back together and then covered over the rest with new material. I created a new philosophy for existing that has guided me these past twenty-five years. I never attempt to understand anyone; I just observe them. They are truly the other. You can never know anyone. There are no soulmates, man or woman, just other minds and other histories. Intimacy is a kind of dream.