The Temple House Vanishing Read online

  The final class of the day was art. By then I was exhausted and presumed I could just sleep through it as I had done in my previous school. To reach the art room we had to leave the building and walk through a walled vegetable garden at the back of the house. Unlike the gravel drive and manicured lawn at the front of the building, this seemed surprisingly unkempt and scruffy. We followed the path through the garden and out of a gate in the wall that led to the edge of the woods to a small summer house. A thick vine grew over the door which was open, and a man stood, smiling and waiting for us. He was tall and lean, with fair hair. He looked young. The air was filled with the smell of wood and peat burning. A kettle was whistling in the gloom behind him.

  It was here I met Victoria. And Mr Lavelle.

  After that, everything changed.

  Chapter Five

  I imagine it is the same feeling one has when falling in love. Though I wouldn’t have known about that then.

  Victoria was sitting on a wing chair by the stove. She had a notepad in her hand and was sketching a stuffed parrot that was perched in a birdcage on the table beside her. One leg was tucked under her and a cigarette lay burning in an ashtray on the arm of her chair. There was also a mug on the table with a black Siamese cat on it and the words ‘I hate you’. She looked up as we entered and her eyes were large and light blue, set wide apart in what was a small, delicate face. Her skin was tanned lightly and her hair was a golden brown. She looked vaguely surprised to see us all enter, raising one eyebrow. We were interrupting her. I had a premonition of her importance in that moment and this is probably why I associate it with love. A recognition of sorts.

  The room was bigger than it looked from the outside. The floor was stone, paint-spattered but covered with oriental rugs; there was a couch that was draped with some silk scarves and a few beanbags with colourful blankets thrown over them. There were easels standing against the walls and a shelf of paint tubes. In one corner was a large glass antique cabinet that looked to be filled with bones and animal heads. The vine that framed the front door was also growing inside and reached over our heads and across the ceiling. The overall experience of the space after the puritanism of the school building was one of a sensory assault.

  Mr Lavelle welcomed us and made tea, pouring it from an old brown-coloured teapot with a striped tea cosy. He handed the mugs out, taking a moment to smile at the six of us there as he did so. One of the girls looked at Victoria before turning to the girl beside her and throwing her eyes up to heaven. They both smiled. Victoria didn’t notice and continued drawing on her notepad.

  Mr Lavelle’s movements were measured and slow. He stooped slightly and the cuffs of his light blue shirt were frayed. It didn’t make him look poor, though, as it would have in my last school. Instead, he looked like he was above caring about his appearance. He was handsome in the way of movie stars. He also sounded vaguely foreign, though I could not make out from where he might have come. It was hard to guess his age, maybe twenty-five or twenty-six. When he finished serving the tea he took a seat beside Victoria. As he went to sit, I saw her look up and they stared at each other for a second longer than they might have. She looked away first.

  Mr Lavelle said we wouldn’t be working on anything curriculum-related that day, instead we would be discussing art and what it means to us. He felt this was a useful way to get to know us. I thought this sounded like the best way to launch my fake, bohemian life and readied myself to discuss my obsession with Dalí and the fictitious summer my parents and I had spent travelling Catalonia in a van.

  He spoke first.

  ‘I would like to tell you about an artist that I recently came across. I feel like her life will have something to add to our discussion here.’

  He leaned back in his chair and cupped his hands behind his neck.

  ‘After the outbreak of the Second World War, this artist, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, was sent to the Terezin concentration camp. This was a camp where the Nazis would try and pretend they treated the Jews well, so although a harsh and no doubt frightening place, it did allow for some small freedoms. It was here that this artist decided to use her talents to teach art classes to the some six hundred children who were there.’

  His voice was clear but low.

  ‘She encouraged them to draw what they felt, not what they could see. So it wasn’t barbed wire and mud that emerged from the drawings but flowers and butterflies and gardens with children playing. They painted their lives, but as they were before, or as they would like to imagine them. Art as a sort of therapy, I suppose. She would hold these classes most days, even grading their drawings.

  ‘After class she would pick a child to help her tidy up all the work. To secure this job was considered a real prize, for the chosen one would get to go to her room, where the walls were covered in her drawings of flowers. A place of colour and light, amid the grey and the miserable.’

  He stopped here and lit another one of his cigarettes, Camel Lights, before continuing. He took a deep drag on it. The nuns must have allowed him to smoke around the students. I was glad, I liked the smell. I noticed Victoria lean her head back and close her eyes briefly as if to inhale in unison with him.

  ‘Eventually, though, things would change for this teacher and her class. The camp was to close and most of those in it were to be sent to other, darker places. Our teacher was sent to Auschwitz.’

  He moved in his seat and for a second he looked at the fire. Victoria opened her eyes and caught my gaze. It felt like a question. I looked down at my hands.

  ‘Before she left, though, she handed one of the other women in the camp a suitcase. A suitcase with over four thousand pictures drawn by the children,’ he said quietly. ‘I think about what made her do this.’ He got up from his chair at this point and moved to the window, his back to us.

  ‘It is to me the most compelling of all her decisions. It is the action that turns, in a way, what was a distraction and simple activity into something more, into something great, something meaningful. Art, essentially,’ he said.

  He turned back and reached down to the ashtray beside Victoria, stamping out his cigarette. She looked at his arm reaching across her as he did so.

  ‘You may guess how this ends. The suitcase and the pictures survived the war, but she and almost all of the children did not.’

  He stayed silent for a moment and rubbed his forehead. The fire spat and crackled in the corner. I felt hot. The silence in the room was suddenly oppressive. My eyes were drawn back to Victoria. She was staring into the grate now, biting her lip as she looked at the flames.

  ‘I tell you this so you can have some understanding of what art means to me,’ he said finally. ‘It is a parable about how art gives us all the ability to transform and transcend, to create something unreal, from what’s around us. To create art is to go on a journey inwards. You each have the potential to find and express what you discover on this journey, regardless of the external circumstances in which you may find yourself.’ He gestured subtly with his head towards the big house, our school.

  He spoke the way I wanted to someday. Lyrical and knowing, rich and inspiring.

  ‘It’s not about exams or assignments and who is best at drawing; we are engaged in something else when we create art, we are revealing ourselves in the truest fashion. My role is not to teach; you rather must show me, tell me who you are through your work. Authenticity, truth, will be our only measure.’

  He sat down again and exhaled loudly, as if there had been effort in telling us this story and now he needed to rest, to be idle for a moment to recover from the depth of his insights. There was a majesty now to the silence in the room, like something had been accomplished, we had crossed over. The light was beginning to fade outside. And for a second I felt like crying. The idea of the teacher with her students, getting them ready for their early death by painting blue skies and flowers. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard and the saddest. He seemed like a poet.

  Victori
a moved then, as if awaking from a long, intense slumber. She unfurled her leg from under her and stretched out, her arms over her head. Mr Lavelle shifted slightly in his seat to watch her.

  ‘Creating art is about trying to get close to someone else,’ she said. ‘It is the attempt of each of us to connect with another.’

  Victoria’s voice was sleepy and rich. I thought of my parents reading the TV Guide and watching soap operas. I wanted to be close to her, to her world, and leaned forward in my seat, as if her words might be precious.

  ‘It fails, of course,’ she went on. ‘We end up just staring at other people’s psychodramas in art galleries and museums, not really closer to anyone, if anything just further apart.’

  After she finished speaking she picked up a chess piece on the table beside her chair. She twirled it in her fingers. Mr Lavelle smiled at her. His eyes shone, as if she was a thing of magnificence. One of the other girls coughed.

  ‘She is my outlier, the student provocateur,’ he said, turning briefly and poking at the fire. ‘That is her role here and don’t ever feel the need to agree with her, or pay her any attention.’

  They looked at each other as he spoke those last words. She touched the collar of her shirt. There was a strange calm between them that made me feel excluded, an outsider.

  One of the other girls said there is no difference in art, books, music – it is all the same expression. She was struggling for depth in her thoughts, anxious to impress. Mr Lavelle was kind but bored at her efforts. Another said that after the Second World War there had been a big question as to whether art had any meaning any more. Art since then was kind of frivolous, and that’s why someone like Andy Warhol had just painted cans of soup. It all meant nothing.

  Victoria liked this and nodded enthusiastically.

  Finally it was my turn.

  ‘I think it’s mostly about loneliness, like when Ian Curtis sings “Love Will Tear Us Apart”. It’s about trying to make up for all the gaps in us. That’s what I feel, when I look at or hear something someone has created.’

  I couldn’t think of anything else to add to this so decided to just stare at the fire in the stove, meaningfully. My voice had sounded thin, unusually high. I could feel Victoria’s gaze on me but I could not look at her.

  Mr Lavelle said, ‘So you agree with Victoria: it is the drive to reach out and connect with others that makes us decide to create an artwork, but you believe it helps us to do this, while she thinks we are doomed to isolation.’

  Thank God he had read something into it.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, emboldened by his words. I looked her straight in the eye. Excitement rose in my chest, an expectation of something. Victoria looked vaguely amused. A slight spark of interest in her direct, blue stare.

  ‘You are a woman of few words, Louisa, but we are okay with that, here.’ He drank from his mug after he said this. ‘It means you are thinking.’

  Victoria looked at him briefly as he spoke to me. Then went back to caressing the chess piece.

  Mr Lavelle thanked us for our contributions. He said we must understand the source of what we are doing in this class and that this is a useful approach to all lessons. One should think first, about the why, before rushing to engage in the detail and the how. I liked the sound of this.

  He then walked over to the cabinet that stood behind the couch and, taking a small key from his belt, he asked each of us to select one item. We would study the object and write a short essay on it that we would then have to read out in front of the class that Friday, an essay describing what it represented to us. After this, we would begin sketching it. He gestured to me to come and pick first.

  I squeezed through the girls sitting on the beanbags and stood beside him in front of the cabinet. It was a warm rosewood colour, engraved with flowers and berries and heavy branches. The glass was curved and protruded from the wood surrounds, creating the sense of three distinct sections. It was tall too; I was not able to see what was on the top shelves. It was at odds with the shabby thrown-togetherness of the rest of the room. He told me the cabinet had been in the old house, had belonged to the family that lived there before the nuns moved in. One of them had been a collector, travelling Europe in the 1920s and 1930s.

  ‘You know the church?’ he said, watching me closely. He smelled of smoke and earth.

  I nodded.

  ‘It was actually the billiards room of the old house,’ he said. ‘People drank whiskey and played cards there before the nuns took over.’

  He turned to face the rest of the class.

  ‘I think it’s important to remember that, here, nothing is ever as it seems.’

  There was a light in him as he spoke. A hunger for something. I smiled, not quite fully understanding what he meant or why he seemed quite so interested in me and my opinion. Then I gazed back at the wondrous array of strange objects in the cabinet.

  ‘Choose, choose something that will matter to you,’ he said, almost under his breath. He had turned back to me. I could sense the closeness of him and I had the distinct feeling that he wanted to impress me. That he needed this from me.

  The cabinet was filled with curious and bizarre items. There was a jar with a dead tarantula in it, a case of butterflies and one with insects, a chain made of teeth; there were stamps, an ivory horn, a photo of a two-headed calf, an old jewellery box, some gemstones, a miniature violin and other jars filled with liquid which was too murky to see what was inside. I chose a skull. It was small, like that of a child. Mr Lavelle nodded as he handed it to me. And for what would not be the first time, I felt like he was a seer and that everything that would come to happen he had already foreseen. I held the skull in my hands. I imagined, for a moment, I could squeeze it and it would shatter.

  I have not thought about this for many years, but now I wonder if I should not have chosen the skull. That perhaps if I had just picked a gemstone, things would have been different. I would not have become what I did. But then I remember the way I felt as they both, he and Victoria, looked at me, and I think perhaps not.

  It was all inevitable.

  Chapter Six

  Victoria said that moments of happiness are always followed by a fall that is in direct proportion to the previous high. Nothing good lasts.

  Within a day of my first art class, I became a target for the pack of Rottweilers also known as the prefects. It began innocently enough with my failure to wear indoor shoes. My mother and I had read the direction about the shoes in the uniform section of my letter of acceptance but had presumed it was some kind of a mistake. It was also an added expense so we conveniently chose to ignore it. But apparently there were shoes for indoors. I hadn’t noticed anyone changing theirs before leaving for art class but it seemed they had. There was also a correct side of the corridors of the school to walk on. I had been witnessed ignoring this rule also.

  The red-headed girl, Helen, from the first night in the chapel, was the head prefect. She called me to the empty sixth years’ common room which was on the second floor of the house. It was a dismal space and smelled vaguely of wet sports clothes. There were a few chairs around the edges of the room and a large green couch in the centre. A sink in the corner had unwashed cups in it and a kettle. Some of the students’ paintings and sketches were Blu-Tacked to the wall. One was of a man in profile; it looked like Mr Lavelle.

  Helen sat on the couch and I pulled up one of the chairs. Looking at her closely she appeared to be made from alabaster, like one of the statues that lined the hallways. All she was missing was the halo. Her skin was pale. Her shirt looked crisply ironed and fresh. Everything about her seemed upright and unrepentant, including her collar. She held a pen in her hand and kept flicking the lid up and down as she spoke.

  ‘Louisa,’ she said. Her eyes were cold and she enunciated my name almost too clearly. It made me think for an instant that maybe she too had something to prove. She certainly wanted to seem older than her age, which could only have been eighteen at the most.<
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  As she was about to speak, one of the other students walked into the room. Helen responded swiftly with a turn of the head and a raised eyebrow. The student left abruptly without saying a word.

  ‘We know this is your first week and that Temple House is a new experience for you, but these rules are important to us.’

  I blinked at her, uncertain as to where this was going.

  ‘We have expensive parquet floors on the corridors. They are about a hundred years old and we need to protect them. That is why we have indoor shoes for wearing,’ she paused, ‘indoors.’

  That’s not the reason, I thought to myself, it’s because you live for rules. They make you feel like there is meaning in the world. It also makes it easier for you to spot the people who don’t fit in.

  I could feel myself hunching in my chair and so made an effort to sit up.

  Life is a performance.

  ‘You will have to make a phone call home this evening and you need to ask to get an extra pair of shoes sent to the school. If you can’t afford this or any other parts of the uniform there is a hardship fund that your parents can apply to or they can buy things in the second-hand uniform sale which we run twice a year – I see you got your jumper from there. We also have some old shoes in Lost and Found that you can wear in the meantime.’

  ‘My jumper isn’t second-hand,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, really. I thought the green was slightly a shade off, like the one we used to have a few years ago,’ she replied.

  She smiled at me like I had some kind of a problem, which I suppose in her eyes I did. A deficiency. A lack of status.

  ‘Anyway, I just wanted to remind you we have standards here; it’s what sets us and the school apart. And I’d hate for you to feel like you don’t meet them. It’s happened before: girls who join at this late stage sometimes struggle. It’s not enough to be good at exams.’