The Temple House Vanishing Read online

  This approach has served me well and I only changed, thought differently about it, after Victoria jumped from the roof of her offices.

  At Victoria’s funeral I had a sudden vision of her. Her divorce had just been finalized and she was in overbearing mode, ordering wine and insisting people try the shellfish. Control was her way of handling failure, which divorce is, I suppose. She was talking about taking a leave of absence from work and going travelling. As I remembered her, I thought about how she had become an idea to me long before she died. We had no way of listening to each other any more. A kind of nervous anxiety took hold of her when I was there. Her head would turn sharply as if I was judging her, or she would fold her arms in a hunted, defensive manner. Our attempts to connect with one another were invariably unsuccessful. We were never able to recapture what had once been. There were too many barriers now.

  It was only as she was standing alone under the neon light of the sign outside the door of the restaurant that she talked about it. A journalist had been in touch. A woman who was writing a story about Temple House and wanted Victoria to contribute and if possible to suggest other people she might talk to. Suddenly, all sense of her as an ordinary woman with a neatly packaged life and tidily referenced history fell away. As it always did. She could only ever play at normal for a while.

  She was twitchy and nervous, fumbling for a cigarette. She looked frail and thin. She wasn’t eating, wasn’t sleeping. I felt like holding her. But I couldn’t; that was not who we were any more. So I walked away, turning back only once to see if she had left. She hadn’t, she was standing on the edge of the pavement, staring into space as the taxis drove past. And I thought that maybe this time, this time, she would speak and tell of all that we had been and how it had ended. Because she can never forget, no matter how much she tries.

  And I can never let her go.

  Her funeral was well-attended and elaborate, with an opera singer in an evening dress and a musician playing Handel on the organ. The people were the smart set, the ones she had known in tennis clubs. Their black coats were expensive, as were their bags. Victoria’s father had been a judge and she grew up in a large house with granite steps that led up to the front door. I had visited once for a cocktail party. She was raised to be part of this world.

  There was an awkwardness in the congregation. People avoided each other’s gaze. The manner of her death was too open, too honest. It made them think of the stories they had heard, the reports that had appeared in the paper that week, the things that might have happened and what she might have known. There were journalists and a photographer at the gates to the church. If Victoria had taken a pile of pills it would have been easier for everyone to handle. Dark things should happen behind closed doors. Her fall through the air was too public.

  I could make out Helen in the pews near the front. I had not seen her since that last day at school, in the summer house. Her red hair was still long but copper-coloured now, her back was straight and unflinching. I thought perhaps life had not broken her. She would not recognize me now.

  The priest spoke of Victoria’s sense of duty and work ethic. She was an admired colleague, a much-loved daughter and sister: platitudes that accompany the eulogy for a lapsed Catholic by a priest that has never met the person who has died. One of the lost sheep the shepherd tries to retrieve, even though it’s too late and everyone knows it. She’s already dead on the dark hillside.

  It was warm in the church. I could see people stirring and shifting in their seats, touching their collars or their hair. Everyone vaguely agitated, listening to words of forgiveness. I found myself drifting off until the end, when he said we must remember that nothing human can ever be alien to us. It was then and only then that I felt like crying.

  I left the church before the coffin came down the aisle. I have lost all care for ritual. Like understanding the past and saying prayers, the capacity for ritual is also gone and with it, I believe, the last of my humanity.

  I am the alien now.

  Chapter Three

  I was to be a weekly boarder at Temple House, home on Friday nights and back to school Sunday evenings for supper and prayers. An embarrassment of high grades in the State Exams I took when I was sixteen secured my place. It hadn’t been my first choice – indeed, boarding of any kind had not been on the agenda – but when the letter arrived in a heavy cream envelope with an actual wax seal, I was intrigued. There was an air of Malory Towers to the whole thing. The charm of running away, of being removed. Dedicating myself to higher things. I also liked tennis and the photos of the tennis courts perched on the edge of a cliff in the brochure were appealing.

  I had another reason for taking the offer. My mother was leaving my father for a man she worked with. A man whose name and various deeds we had listened to her talking about innocuously enough for the last year as she prepared dinner. We had even met him once, at the cinema. He was standing in the queue ahead of us with his own three sons, when my mother called out his name. It was a faux jovial encounter with lots of ‘Isn’t this nice’ and ‘Imagine meeting here’ and so on. He dressed better than Dad did and when he shook my hand he said: ‘So I hear you are the bright one; have to watch ourselves around you.’ He laughed then and his teeth were unusually small. One of his children made bunny ears over the head of a younger one. Thankfully, we didn’t sit with them. My mother had some sense of decorum.

  I wrote in my diary later, when I knew more, that the experience had been ‘alienating’. This was a favourite word at that time.

  Since she broke the news of her leaving, there had been a kind of entente cordiale at home. My father looked like he had expected it and was being weirdly gracious around her. She looked exhausted and left the house most nights to meet friends to talk about all that was not being said at our house. It was the summer before I would leave for the new school, I had nothing to do, everyone was away. I spent most of the time alone, unseen, listening to Depeche Mode on my Walkman and lying under the apple tree at the end of the garden reading, or just looking at the sky.

  Conversation was predictable most days:

  ‘You should go out more, Louisa,’ says my mother.

  ‘I don’t have any money,’ my response.

  ‘You could look for a job. All you do is read,’ says Mother.

  ‘I like reading and it happens to be free,’ I answer.

  ‘Has your father fixed the light over your bed? Don’t read at night if he hasn’t done it,’ she says, ploughing ahead.

  ‘He hasn’t fixed it yet,’ I say.

  ‘What is wrong with him. . .’ She is speaking to herself now.

  ‘I don’t know, what is wrong with him?’ I reply.

  Silence.

  It was a rare hot summer, the kind of summer you remember. The one that over time becomes the template for all the summers of the past.

  The backdoor to the house open, the vague sound of tennis on the TV in the distance, flies trapped in the house at night and a strained silence over dinner. Sometimes the phone would ring in the late afternoon and I would traipse into the house, cursing, and answer it. Usually, no one would speak and I could hear heavy breathing and then laughter in the background. I used to hold my breath for a minute before hanging up, willing them to speak, to tell me who they were. But they never did. Something about the weird pointlessness of those calls became a strange metaphor for that summer.

  In the evenings when my mother was out and my father had gone to bed, I would open the drinks cabinet and take some sherry from the heavy glass decanter that was covered in dust. It was thick and sweet and made me want to vomit, which was just what I wanted it to do, but I could never drink enough and so just fell into bed hot and vaguely nauseous. My dreams were the ones I had used to have as a child where there are two sets of my parents, the good ones and the evil ones. In the dream I am always standing behind a closed door, knowing they are inside but afraid to enter because I don’t know which version of them will be waiting for me. I w
oke in the mornings with my sheets all astray and the pillows halfway down the bed. The sun would be coming through the thin material of the curtains and I would lie there trying to guess the time. If I guessed right, I would reward myself with an extra bowl of cereal at breakfast.

  My exam results, the ones that would decide whether I could escape to a better school to finish my education, had been the most important thing all that year but were now fading into oblivion. The day they were due to come out was circled in red on the calendar that hung on the back of the kitchen door. The paintings for each month were by someone who was deaf or blind or who had used their foot to paint instead of their hand. The picture for August had a child with no face in a blue raincoat standing on the edge of a dark forest. I thought the images were depressing and freaky, like badly drawn omens for the months ahead.

  Of course no one talked about my exams that much anyway. It was all about whether to sell the house or not. She was going to move with the ‘new man’ into what was being referred to as a town house in the centre of the city. She always hated the suburbs, she said. There was going to be a small room for me. She kept saying we would decorate it together, as if this was some kind of a bonus feature. I felt like telling her I had a room, here in this house, which we had also decorated together.

  I had never really thought of them as unhappy. They seemed just like everyone else’s parents. Occasionally silently resentful; mostly tired from their jobs. I only ever remembered them fighting while in the car, for some reason. Possibly the enclosed space added to the tension. Also on holidays; those fights had usually involved small spaces and maps. And now, since the end had come, they were both being polite and respectful. What a fuck-up, really.

  It was a new way to be marked out. To have parents that were separating. It used to be my IQ that people had heard of. But now it was this. Pity was the abiding emotion as they watched us come and go from behind net curtains on our narrow road. There was only one other girl in my year whose parents had split up. She had a set of house keys and every afternoon when we were packing up to head home, she would take them out and lay them on her desk. I guessed she didn’t want to be locked out.

  My parents offered no explanations, other than it was best for all concerned if they went their separate ways. I would understand; I was, after all, a bright child. They also assured me their love for me was never in question. They talked about this a lot. And I knew they were telling the truth so let it wash over me. The tendency to not judge was in me from the start. They both looked like they had aged ten years and it made me question if it was possible to build future happiness on the back of causing pain to others. I thought possibly not and that people tricked themselves into thinking this.

  The day of the results came late that August and my mother made pancakes. She had taken the day off work and was all set to walk me to my school to collect them. She had plans for a day of mother and daughter togetherness. We would go and have cake in a coffee shop near her office, where the ‘new man’ might pop his head in and say hello. As she talked on, I watched the TV news. There was a giant number in the top corner of the screen telling how many days of fighting there had been in a far-off war. It was day 15. I thought it seemed kind of incongruous to have a number there, like it was a gameshow set in the desert.

  As my mother did the dishes, I left the house quietly, picked up my bike which leaned against the front wall, and set off on my own. I felt she had forsaken any rights to gloat over me, to show me off to him.

  The school was a crappy glass and plywood mess about five minutes from where we lived. I walked into the hallway where the teachers were giving out the envelopes. I remember feeling like the crowds parted; I was the best and everyone knew it. They had been waiting for me. The gifted kid. The one who would prove that great talent can come from a modest home and parents who can’t stand each other. Ms O’Malley was smiling at me, envelope in hand. She whispered, ‘It’s just as we planned it,’ and squeezed my arm.

  Somebody took my photo for the local paper.

  And I felt sure then that something was ending, and something else was beginning.

  Chapter Four

  Mr Lavelle, my favourite teacher at Temple House, once said there is something inherently dark and powerful at play in adolescence. A kind of alchemy that takes place underneath the surface of everything, including your skin. It bursts out in different ways and, depending on the era in which you live through, it will be met with hysterical fear and damnation or just attempts at coercive control. It’s the necessary thwarting of an emergent power.

  I told him that’s why they tell us fairy tales when you’re young. They tell you that you are powerless so as to make you less powerful. Don’t go to the woods, for if you wander you will get lost and there is darkness everywhere. Wolves in the undergrowth. And be warned, only the pure and the lucky will be rescued.

  He laughed at this and said of course we were the perfect fairy tale. The girls in the Victorian mansion on the hill, surrounded by fields, trees and the sea. A world of lemon polish and silence, incense and martyrs. The black wrought-iron gates locked to keep out the world and the changes he said were coming.

  It was a life where in the last class on a Tuesday we typed job application letters to fictitious companies on large computers. Phones were attached by thick black cords to walls in draughty corridors and every few weeks we would kneel in the dark before a man to tell him our sins. It was a hermetically sealed universe of tradition and ritual, prayers and devotions, where the individual was born into Original Sin and required to examine their conscience and seek forgiveness. Endlessly. And we as teenage girls had much to make amends for. As Mr Lavelle said, alchemy was everywhere.

  Those first few days, of course, I had no idea of the extent of this. As I dressed that first morning after my sleepless night thinking about the dead nun, I became convinced I needed a backstory, one that would be unusual. I couldn’t fake being rich. Instead I thought I would go the bohemian route and claim my father was a writer and my mother a painter. We would be unusual. I would reinvent myself.

  The first full day began with breakfast in the long hall, followed by a short assembly at eight fifteen that was led by Sister Frances, the Deputy Principal. We stood in lines in front of the stage. I accidentally joined the third years before hissing from several of the girls indicated I had made a major error. I briefly saw one of the other new girls who I had met the afternoon before. Her eyes looked huge and uncertain. I found my place at the back of the correct line. The girl in front of me smelled of sweat and her hair was greasy, tied up in a limp ponytail. The back of the line was clearly for the losers. The girl in front of her had spots on the back of her neck that every now and then she would pick at.

  The prefects stood at the top of the Hall and for about three minutes they pointed and directed us until the lines were perfectly straight. All the while, Sister Frances stood on the stage, her head nodding up and down with each direction given. Her face was almost completely round and shiny, like a kind of ruddy apple.

  When the lines were deemed appropriately straight, the prefects took their places and we waited for Sister Frances to speak. I expected the kind of sentimental speech that my old school principal would give, one where she told us we each had a talent that they, the teachers, would endeavour to excavate over the next year, while also warning us not to smoke or take drugs. But it was not to be.

  Sister Frances spoke a prayer in Latin for a few minutes. I was oblivious to its meaning though charmed by the enigma of the words. Then she went silent and bowed her head. A strategic pause that lasted for two minutes. I knew this because I kept watching the clock on the wall in the corner. No one moved or even took a breath, it seemed. Finally, she raised her head and led us in a decade of the rosary. The hum of the voices in unison was vaguely comforting though the words over time became mangled and indistinguishable and every now and then I would lose my place. When it was finished she made a sign of the cross that w
e copied. She then left the stage, disappearing behind the dusty red velvet curtain that had framed her.

  It was a dispiriting end. We didn’t even get a timetable.

  We were divided up into small classes that switched between subjects every forty-five minutes. Anyone who did make eye contact looked away quickly enough. I felt like a ghost. With each ring of the bell, I had to try and find my way down back stairs and corridors. The house had clearly never really been adapted to be a school. Some of the classrooms had fireplaces in the corners and cornicing, or a lone chaise longue under a window. French class was on the first floor in what must have been a drawing room at one time. Mustard-coloured curtains framed the large windows that faced the sea and a chandelier with some of its crystals missing hung at an awkward angle in the centre of the room.

  The teacher of that class was somewhat glamorous and very thin. She had short blonde hair and was tanned. She was also French, which the teacher in my last school had not been. She was not friendly in any way and when she asked me to describe my summer holidays she winced openly at my accent. A few people laughed and the teacher frowned at them. She disliked us all equally, which was some consolation.

  As the day wore on I did get some sense of who was in my class and what they were like. The few conversations I overheard offered fleeting glimpses of boats moored on rugged coastlines and hotels with terraces that hung over lakes. I also began to get some idea as to who was who. There was a group of three girls who moved as one in the corridors. They were leisurely and commanding in their ease, with the dull, listless expressions of those who know too early they are beautiful. They all had fair hair and wore small pearl earrings and the same brown brogues, their white socks perfectly straight. The others always left three empty seats for them at the back of each class. Then there were the duds, the ones who had stood at the back of the line with me. They had spots and cold sores and hair that seemed less shiny. And in between was everyone else, the blurred masses of the average.