Can you keep a secret, p.12
Can You Keep A Secret?, page 12
‘Look,’ he said, and I came forward, understanding at once what he meant. It was the most perfect view of the west side of the big house.
I stood there, gazing at the darkened stone of the house, itself a silhouette now as night fell. Bats flew into the eaves, their wings fluttering, and above the high slate roof and the chimneystacks the sky had taken on a purplish hue. You could just make out the dark humps of the hills of Kilkenny beyond.
‘You’d hardly think anything was wrong with it, would you?’ Patrick said quietly, his voice very near.
And it was true. From this distance, the house looked perfect, its glory from the old days recaptured. I understood why he had chosen this house to live in, but at the same time there was something about it that did not feel quite right. I suppose I thought it might be difficult watching from this view while other people took over his ancestral home, the place he had fought so hard to keep and yet, ultimately, lost.
I was musing on this as I gazed out of the window when, suddenly, to the left of my vision, the low roof seemed to swing down sharply. I jumped back with a swift intake of breath and then his arms were around me, and I felt his body pressed against my back, his head leaning down to mine, his chin brushing against my hair, my heart hammering away in my chest.
‘I’m so glad you’re here,’ he told me softly, before drawing me with him to the bed.
Up there under the eaves, there was only the dimness of moonlight falling through the bare window, and we didn’t say a word to each other as we hurriedly undressed beneath the sheets before coming together again. All language fled, the only sounds the parting of lips, the brush of skin on skin, the sharp inward breath.
I don’t know how long we slept. When I woke, it was still dark, still silent, no early-morning birdsong, no lavender-blue dawn. My head was pounding, and the events of the previous evening came rushing back through the pulse that was beating in my eye. I needed water, so with Patrick still asleep beside me, I felt around for my clothes and dressed silently in the dark. Downstairs, Jinny lay curled up on a chair, and in the little kitchen I filled a glass with water. As I leaned against the countertop and drank deeply, I felt the discomfort around my eye grow more intense, a tightness in the muscles beneath my skin. I needed to sleep properly. I needed pain relief. I had left the wad of my pills back in the big house and felt a stab of guilt now at having forgotten to take them the night before.
The twitter and call of the dawn chorus was just beginning as I let myself out and hastened back towards the house. I could see the outline of the roof, the proud chimneystacks darkly silhouetted against the sky. All the lights were turned out, the occupants having retreated to their rooms to sleep. It was as I neared the house that my eye was caught by the flare of a tiny red light in an upper window. The glow of burning embers in a cigarette when seen from a distance. It was so small and far away that at first I thought I was imagining it. But as I paused on the path and stared up, the light briefly flared again, then disappeared. As my eyes grew accustomed to the half-light, I could make out the figure of a person standing in the window looking down at me. Half hidden by the curtain, I couldn’t make out their face. The window was directly above the drawing room. Realization came to me like a cold, hard shock. Someone was there, in my room.
I ran. My feet hitting the gravel hard, I pelted around to the kitchen door and flung it open. Any concern I had for the sleeping occupants was lost as I hastened through the house and up the stairs, feeling the breath dragging in my lungs as I ran along the landing, flung open the door and switched on the light, fired up to confront this intruder, only to find nothing. The room was empty.
The curtains were drawn back, exposing the swathe of darkness beyond. I stood at the window and stared across at the stables, seeking out the window beneath the eaves beyond which I had left Patrick sleeping. I found it easily, and imagined my own ghostly face peering back at me through the darkness.
Enough, I thought, pushing myself away from the window and hastily drawing the curtains. Had there been someone in my room? It seemed unlikely, and I told myself I’d imagined it. After all, how reliable was my vision after what had happened?
I sat on my bed, exhausted, perplexed. I was aware of a smell. The odour of cigarette smoke lingering in the air. Beneath it the sweeter – almost sugary – scent of rosewater.
I needed to sleep. Slipping off my shoes with irritation, I kicked one of the them across the room, and it chimed against something hard and glassy. A picture leaning against the wall. I got up and went over to it. This picture, I am sure, had not been there when I arrived yesterday, when I settled in. But there it was, and even before I crouched down next to it, even before I took it in my hands and held it up to the half-light falling thinly from the dusty overhead bulb, I knew somehow what it would be.
Round eyes staring into the camera, a question in them. Bare feet, dead rabbits hanging from above, and that naked stare.
I looked at it for only a moment, then I put it back, placed it turned away from me towards the wall.
I switched off the light and lay on my bed, but the image remained in my head. My own face, twenty years younger, staring right back at me. Turning over, I felt the lift of the mattress, as if some ghostly figure had only just left. I closed my eyes in the darkness, cigarettes and rosewater troubling my sleep.
14
1991
The exhibition is taking place in the Arts Club on Fitzwilliam Square. A lively throng fills the stairwell when we arrive and we have to push through to make our way up to the exhibition space. Hilary goes ahead after the boys but Rachel holds me back.
‘Loos,’ she says.
It was her idea to bring a change of clothes. She insists we get out of our uniforms immediately before entering the crowd. I have brought with me a purple top and black jeans. Rachel squeezes herself into a clinging black dress with a plunging neckline.
By the sinks, she takes out a tube of red lipstick and applies it carefully. Her lips, naturally full, swell now with the vivid shade. Passing me the lipstick, she insists I use it: ‘Colour yourself in a bit,’ as she puts it. But it looks garish on me. My lips are too thin. I rub most of it away with tissue so that only a smudge of colour remains.
Standing back to survey her appearance, she asks: ‘Too much?’ and I tell her no, that she looks beautiful. Which she does. Beautiful and grown-up. Older than sixteen. Older than me. And it’s not just the clothes or her figure that make her look older. It is in the way she conducts herself. The way she moves. She oozes confidence.
The exhibition is taking place in two large rooms already heaving with people. It is bright, hot, crowded, so that the photographs lining the walls are obscured. Heads turn in Rachel’s direction and I watch as she pretends not to notice the stares, the occasional wide-eyed leer.
Her parents are in the middle of the throng in the first room, and we push our way towards them. It’s been a while since I’ve been invited to Thornbury and I’ve worried that I have somehow offended them, overstepped the mark. I am a little nervous as I approach.
‘Ray-Ray! My little ray of light!’ her father says. He makes no comment on her appearance, just draws her into a fatherly hug. Then he turns and hugs me, too. The gesture catches me off guard. So often with the Bagenals, I feel on uncertain ground, but his embrace seems an acceptance of some sort, like I am part of the family.
‘Look at you two girls,’ Heather says, kissing both of us to the side of each cheek. ‘I’m quite sure this isn’t school regulation,’ she remarks, tweaking the short skirt of Rachel’s tight-fitting dress, but her expression is warmly complicit, and I have the sudden insight that this is exactly the way she herself would have behaved when she was sixteen. ‘Isn’t this wonderful? Such a good show!’ I think she means the photographs, but it is only as she looks around the room, her face animated as she identifies various friends within the crowd, that I realize she means it’s a good turnout. ‘Make sure you go and talk to the Brennans, Rachel dear. They were asking about you earlier. Look, there’s Maureen Quinn – go over and say hello.’ In response to Rachel’s groan, she says, ‘Take note of your brother over there.’ Patrick stands chatting to an elderly couple in front of a large framed shot of the granite pillars and white wrought-iron gates that lead to the avenue at Thornbury. It is the first time in this crowded room that I get a true glimpse of one of the exhibits. The picture is black and white and there is an ethereal quality to the light falling on to the dust road and the shadiness of the trees beyond.
‘If I must,’ Rachel says, and drifts away from us through the crowd to talk to ‘the oldies’, as she puts it.
I expect Heather to turn back to her husband, who is deep in conversation with a group of peers, but instead she reaches out and takes a gentle but firm hold of my upper arm. ‘So good of you to come, Lindsey,’ she says.
‘Oh, it’s nothing. I’m happy to be invited,’ I say, a little confused. She is like a different person tonight. It’s as if the incident in the scullery never happened. As if I just dreamed it. She even looks different. Her hair appears shorter than usual, more chic. Long earrings the colour of jade hang low underneath the wings of her newly cut hair, and her face is brightly made up. When she reaches to smooth back a stray lock of my hair, the batwing sleeve of her green silken dress spreads and shimmers. I am reminded of a butterfly.
‘You’re such a good friend to our Rachel,’ she tells me, with warmth and sincerity. ‘Such a comfort to me to know she has someone to rely on. Someone to look out for her.’
‘She’s my best friend.’ I sound foolish to myself, but it’s all I can think of to say.
‘Watch her for me tonight, will you? Make sure she doesn’t go too crazy with the wine. I’d say it to her myself, only I fear she would react by doing the exact opposite. We can’t have her returning to school drunk and getting expelled now, can we?’ She gives her little tinkly laugh, and her dress shimmers as she touches my hair again with affection. Dazzled by her, I murmur my agreement.
Once she has exacted my compliance, she urges me to join my friends, before moving back to her husband. I watch her running a hand along his back, his arm going instinctively around to draw her in close.
Patrick stands with his hands behind his back, the elderly couple he is chatting to beaming up at him. He looks every inch the respected head boy, the responsible older son. Rachel is doing her duty, too, although she appears less committed. Her eyes keep sliding away, as though seeking out someone else in the room. Niall is here as well, with his new girlfriend, an Asian beauty with a swathe of inky-black hair. He makes a point of introducing Thea to Rachel, an event which passes off innocuously enough, neither girl betraying any envy of or interest in the other.
I find Marcus in front of a portrait of himself. He looks baffled and amused.
‘I can’t believe he included it,’ he tells me, one hand in his pocket, sipping a glass of white wine.
We stand side by side, considering the black-and-white image of Marcus standing under the arch leading to the stables, taken with the sun behind him so that his shadow and that of the walls appear long and sharp – angular.
‘It’s good,’ I say, a remark which elicits a pointed look from him.
‘Do you think so?’
‘Do you not?’
He looks back at the picture.
‘It seems a bit, I dunno, derivative. Like I’ve seen it before. It’s like something you’d see hanging in the waiting room of a dentist’s surgery, you know? With some kind of affirmation quote beneath it.’ He makes a little noise of impatience or dissatisfaction, and then says: ‘Also, it’s a bit cheeky, don’t you think? I mean, he didn’t even ask me if it was okay to include it. And I know that my face is in shadow so you might not easily recognize me, but I kind of feel like he used me.’
‘Used you?’
He takes his hand from his pocket and scratches at the back of his neck. Like Patrick, he is dressed in his school blazer. His hair has been freshly dyed, and the artificial blackness lends a new pallor to his face.
‘You know I want to do architecture after finishing school, right? Well, I’d had this conversation with him about it. I suppose I got a bit carried away, telling him how I loved modernist structures, going on a bit about Walter Gropius.’ With this admission, he shakes his head. ‘And look at the picture he takes of me – all those hard lines and sharp angles. And me in the middle of it all. It’s like he’s taking the piss.’
‘I think you’re overreacting.’
‘Maybe I am. It’s just … I wish he’d asked me about it first. At least shown it to me. Did he show you yours?’
‘Mine?’
He drinks again from his glass. ‘Oh, you’re here, too. We all are.’
There are so many people that it is hard to get a good look at each photograph. Strange to see Thornbury represented in this way. These black-and-white shots of the house, enlarged and framed, look otherworldly, rarified. Perhaps it’s because they are, for the most part, unpeopled, and that lends the house a deserted look. Even when the pictures do contain a human being – Rachel or Patrick, Heather, even one of the dogs – they are captured from afar. The house is all.
It is only as the evening wears on and the crowd thins that I find my picture. People are beginning to leave. A woman with a coat over her arm stops briefly beside me, saying: ‘Lovely picture of you.’ She puts out her hand as she speaks and gives my arm a quick squeeze before moving past me to the door. It is disconcerting.
And there I am. Hung to one side of the chimneybreast in the second room. It is a small enough image – smaller than most of the others here – but what is striking about it is the proportion of space given over to the human subject. I am so much larger than the others in their pictures. There is something raw and defenceless in the way I am gazing directly out. The surfaces of the room look cold around me – the flagstones beneath my bare feet, the hard stone counter above which the rabbits hang. But it is my own face that captivates me. It almost doesn’t look like me. The unsmiling mouth, the wide-eyed stare with something at the back of it – suspicion? Fear? I can hardly draw my gaze away from it.
When Hilary comes up behind me, I am engrossed.
‘When was it taken?’ she asks, startling me.
‘A few weeks back,’ I answer.
She doesn’t say anything to that. There is a fine line running along her brow, one of concentration or tiredness. A sprinkling of acne mars the skin of her chin. Her face is pale and she appears sullen.
‘Is that the only time he’s photographed you?’ she asks, still staring at the picture, frowning in concentration.
‘I think so.’
‘You think so? You’d know if it wasn’t. You’d know it all right.’
I can hear a sneer in her words. I don’t know what she is getting at, but I feel like I am being called out for something – lying or being disingenuous. I watch her little piggy eyes drilling the picture with their stare and I experience a strong and immediate wave of dislike.
‘What’s the matter?’ I ask her. ‘Don’t you like it?’
‘I couldn’t care less,’ she says coldly.
‘I don’t know why you’ve come if you’re going to be so bloody grumpy about everything. God, I’m so sick of you moping around all the time, this thing you’ve got against Rachel. We’re all sick of it. Is it because she’s friends with me now, is it? Are you jealous? Because if you are, then that’s pathetic.’
She waits a beat before saying tightly, ‘Not in the least.’ Just before she turns away, I see the film of tears in her eyes. I don’t call her back. As she makes her way towards the cloakroom, I am glad to see her go.
It is after ten. We have been warned to be back at school by half past. Patrick reminds us of this, and Rachel frowns, still wanting to hang on, even though most of the crowd has left and those that remain are making plans to wander up to Toners for a drink.
In the Ladies, we change back into our uniforms and wipe the lipstick from our mouths. The others are waiting for us at the door. And even as we leave, I see Rachel’s eyes darting around the room one last time, as if still trying to catch a glimpse of the person who has not come.
15
2017
I slept then. A fitful, narrow sleep. Fully clothed on top of the bedcovers, face down, limbs splayed like I’d just been shot in the back. I woke alone to a sticky mouth, a muddle of thoughts and a body that felt wrung out rather than rested. The light was coming brightly through the window, and I could tell by the whiteness of it that morning was already well advanced. I sat up, tired and disoriented, a hollow feeling inside me like I hadn’t eaten for days.
I stared at my face in the mirror of the wardrobe door and felt the breath catch in my throat. The injury was grotesque. My eyelid, swollen and purple, sucked away the colour from the rest of my face, and there was a bulge above my brow. The wound had become the focal point, the rest of my face fanning out weirdly from it. It frightened me how unfamiliar I looked to myself.
From somewhere outside in the garden, I could hear Jinny barking. Turning from the insult of my own reflection, I looked out the window at the grass shimmering brightly under the sun. Two figures walked slowly from the stables towards the house, and I recognized the broad-shouldered figure of Patrick, and Marcus’s long, lean shape. Suddenly, Patrick made a gesture, a quick wave of his hand that seemed to suggest impatience, and his pace quickened.
I was aware that I was staring, but couldn’t bring myself to look away. Marcus, who had been holding himself stiffly throughout the exchange, seemed to become agitated. Catching up with Patrick now, he gave a quick shake of his head, before pointing to the house, an emphatic, stabbing gesture, and making some final remark before overtaking his friend, his pace increasing. Then Patrick reached forward and grabbed the other man’s arm. With alarming swiftness, he drew Marcus back and slammed him against the wall, pinning him with one hand, the other hand pointing in his face.
