The Dead House Read online

  That first month I sold three of her paintings, and I moved maybe six to eight each year after that for the better part of a decade, at decent prices too as her name became more and more established. She never cared about money, never queried a sale. Along the way, there were fallow periods when her work would change direction and we’d have to endure six or nine months of drought before she could again bring herself to produce anything saleable, and during those times I’d call on the phone or pay her frequent visits, not to try and press her into production but simply to chat, to touch base, take her out for coffee or lunch and, without discussion, to help her out with rent arrears, float her enough to get by. Her naivety kept her alive, I think, and I came to love her like a little sister.

  The most recent dry period was different. A year, maybe a little longer. The span of time bothered me less than the nature of it. Inevitably, there’d been a man involved. Pete, a handsome city type, all briefcase and umbrella, something in an area of finance that to everyone but the law sounds like a monumental con. They’d met through friends, at a party, I think, and for a while she was all in, smitten by his appetites and ambitions, even going so far as to start whispering words of marriage. I worried about her. Over the years, there’d been men, one or two decent enough, the rest not, but somehow she’d managed to remain an innocent, if a scarred one. And an avowed romantic, the kind who shatters when dropped. I wanted more than anything for her to be happy and didn’t give a damn, really, if she never touched a brush again. But I knew from early on that she’d made another wrong turn. It was clear to me, even without having to see the bruises. When she spoke on the phone the marks were in her voice, not a tremor exactly but a shadow of something – pain, fear, whatever. An underlying understanding of the dark. I’d met Pete only once. He was tall and thin, not muscular but with a kind of threatening hardness, and nurtured these long, still silences that made you swallow and want to look away. Maggie would laugh whenever I asked if she was all right, or at my offer, no questions asked, of a bed for the night or for as long as she needed, should she ever feel like bailing. Laugh as if I’d just landed the punchline to the month’s hottest gag, and say no, thanks but no, she was fine, that it was nothing, just an argument, the usual, that she’d been working too hard or that he had. And then, some months on, I got a call from Canada, from Rosemary, asking if I knew that Maggie had been hospitalised. I didn’t, which hurt more deeply than I could have said. What I found waiting for me was carnage: severe bruising to her throat, mouth and eyes, two cracked ribs, a broken right wrist – mercifully not her painting hand. The nurses had had to shave the hair on one side of her head so that they could put a horseshoe of twenty-two stitches into the scalp above her left ear. From where she’d caught her head on the edge of the door, she explained, unable to look at me, her voice birdlike with shame. When I saw her in the bed, smashed into so many tiny pieces, I wanted to cry, and within seconds began to wonder how I’d go about getting hold of a gun. It never went further than that, but there was a very real moment when I believe I could actually have been capable of committing murder.

  She had to get out, and she did. The law’s interest in what had occurred was sympathetic but fleeting, because domestic-abuse cases are always complicated. A young officer, a woman in clothes so plain she might as well have carried a sign around her neck, came and sat at the bedside. You could tell by the set of her mouth and by her eyes, which shifted in slow drags back and forth between Maggie in the bed and where I stood leaning against the window sill, that she’d been doing this twice a week for years and knew all the likely computations by heart. In a voice trained to the gentle, she told us that they’d investigate the matter to its fullest extent, and would try to make life as difficult as possible for the bastard. They’d show up at his workplace, make a big deal of requesting to search his desk, his car, confiscate his clothes so that they could scrutinise for traces of blood, hair and skin fibres. They’d even drop a few insinuations to his colleagues, particularly his female colleagues, so he’d know that everyone knew. But, she added, lowering her stare to the floor, it would be best not to expect too much, because the likelihood of pinning anything solid on him would be next to impossible. Despite a very real and explicit medical report, which was unequivocal in stating that the injuries Maggie sustained were one hundred percent consistent with a prolonged and particularly brutal assault, the evidence against the accused was circumstantial at best, and too heavily reliant on hearsay. He’d been careful, which suggested that he’d done this before, and the odds on achieving a conviction were thin to the point of anorexic. In fact, the case was unlikely even to make it as far as trial. Nevertheless, the officer was as good as her word, and Pete was harassed with three separate unannounced visits to his place of work, once even timed to coincide with his lunchtime absence from the office. Finally, when every avenue of inquiry had been exhausted, he was brought in for questioning and, as a way of inflicting as much discomfort as possible, held for the maximum allowable number of hours in a small, cold, windowless cell. Inevitably, on the advice of his solicitor and because he was intelligent and maybe experienced enough to understand the rules of play, he denied everything, and then a young woman came forward who was willing to swear under oath that he’d been with her on the night in question. The entire night. Her lie was obvious from half a mile away but the police were left with no option but to issue a release and grudgingly drop all charges.

  Three weeks later, Maggie checked herself out of the hospital and into my care. At that time, I was leasing a two-bedroomed apartment in Kensington, a comfortable, spacious second-floor pad in Connaught Village, and I set her up in the spare room, with lots of good spring-time light and a south-facing view over Hyde Park. She spent most of those first days and weeks of recuperation stretched out on the sofa, swaddled in heavy sweaters or an old flannel nightgown, watching endless recycles of bargain hunting, property renovation and cookery programmes, and trying not to think about the world beyond my walls, trying to forget the person she’d so recently been. Sometimes, if I kept on enough and because my kitchen skills were barely a step evolved from abject, I was able to coax her into dressing and we’d eat out at one of the local restaurants. Such evenings were, for the most part, quite pleasant, but I could recognise the effort they required of her and the toll they took, and so mostly we fell for the recklessly unhealthy but far more convenient option and dined in on Chinese or Indian takeaways, food that could be ordered by number and eaten in a sprawl.

  And then, one night, while watching the round-up of the day’s football fixtures on the late news, she leaned across and kissed the corner of my mouth. ‘I’m almost ready to leave,’ she said, ‘if that’s okay with you. But I just wanted to say thanks.’

  She looked better, though not yet quite right, and all I could think about was the warmth of her lips, what it had meant and what it might yet mean. I nodded, and pulled on a state of calm I didn’t truly feel.

  ‘What’s the plan?’

  ‘Ireland.’

  She’d been there once before, she said, years ago, when she was just a girl, and I saw by the smile that, in her mind, she had already returned.

  *

  She spent that late March and early April in West Cork, alone, touring the Beara Peninsula in a hired car, stopping with each night’s darkness at the first guest house that offered itself, spending as much of each day as possible outside, exposed to the rigours of the natural world, drinking in the scenery and sensations. The worst of her marks had faded, her hair had grown back and been cut into a presentable, if somewhat boyish, shape, one that passed for fashionable as long as you had no understanding of just how little style and fashion actually mattered in her world. But even though she was nowhere near fully healed, she had to go, had to do this. She ached, she said, for the solitude of the mountains and the sea. And I understood. Part of it was running away, because there are times when we all need escape, if only to assure ourselves that we still possess some
modicum of that courage, and part had to do with searching for the things she’d lost and given up, the things that helped make her who she was. I think, after all she’d been through, she just needed to start feeling like a complete person again.

  ‘This place is everything,’ she said, on the phone. ‘Even the air has wildness. I feel as if I’m out here collecting colours.’ This was the third or fourth night, and she had just left Bantry and stopped off in Glengarriff, at a hotel called The Eccles, a quaint, old-fashioned place with great rates, decent food and breathtaking views out over the bay. She had already been for a walk, through the village and back and then down to where the ferry departed for the short jaunt across to Garnish Island. Seals clung like hulking black molluscs to the rocks and, out on the pier, a couple of elderly tourist anglers, German or Dutch, and brothers or at least relatives if the striking resemblance was genuine and not merely suggested by the matching knee-length shorts and green plastic windbreakers, stood talking-distance apart and, without ever disconnecting their gazes from the water, conversed in half-finished sentences during the lulls between casts. She’d have happily stayed for weeks, she told me, maybe even longer, because there was so much to see and feel around there, but she consoled herself with the thought that, since she was basically travelling in circles, the road would bring her back this way soon enough and she could still decide to stay then, if the yearning hadn’t let up. Her plan, though, was to explore the peninsula in a slow anticlockwise sweep, keeping to a lazy fifteen or twenty miles a day limit, just a touch above walking pace, so that she could more thoroughly absorb the details of the landscape. Of course, the weather got in the way of everything good, the sky filthy shades of mud and rock, a west wind that opened you wide and got to know you from the inside out. But rain was this world’s natural and permanent condition, a soft, relentless fur that muted distances and clung to the mountainsides like the smoke of fairy fires. To meet the place under better circumstances would mean to see only its lying face.

  Something like a week passed then before I heard from her again, but the length of her silence didn’t bother me. Fey to the point of self-absorbed, she’d always struggled with a comprehension of time and its implications. And busy with my own small world, I hadn’t a chance to worry.

  I’d just gotten in from a gallery opening in Chelsea where, as a favour to one of my contacts, I’d stood, pushed beyond my usual tolerance barrier to sift the three or four acceptable pieces of work from the clutter of greater dross, then forced myself to endure half a glass of foul red wine and spent an hour or so slipping in and out of airy conversations. When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, barefoot, buttering toast.

  ‘I’m not coming back,’ she announced, without as much as a word of greeting. ‘Ever. I’ve seen a place and it’s perfect. It’s everything I want.’

  I sat down with my tea and listened, knowing better than to interrupt. In gales of excitement, she described the small tied cottage in Allihies: a wild, beautiful, isolated ruin that dated to pre-Famine times, late eighteenth or early nineteenth century at least, with foundations that likely went back much further. Perched on its own hillside and spilling some five and a half acres down to the ocean and a rugged stretch of shoreline, it was blessed with the kind of scenery artists often spend entire lifetimes searching for and never finding. Going for less than the chorus of a song, too. A steal.

  ‘You said a ruin.’

  ‘Well, yes, I admit that the condition is a bit short of pristine, but what would you expect for nineteen thousand? In London, people probably spend that much on a garden shed.’

  The truth, of course, lay between the lines. The cottage, which had never been wired or plumbed, was last occupied some time between the wars, and had stood empty and abandoned to the elements ever since. ‘Short of pristine’ was auctioneer-speak for the fact that it would require significant renovation both inside and out. The little remaining thatch had long since turned rotten and been overrun with rats, the chimney had fallen in, and there was clear evidence along the gable end of structural collapse, possibly at foundation level. A well, some fifty yards away towards the bottom of the first acre and now partially caved in, offered the only realistic access to drinking water.

  But these were all problems that money could fix, and, as far as she was concerned, the true worth of this place went far beyond mere stone and mortar. She’d seen it from the road, in passing, just as the noon light seeped momentarily chalky through the bluish knuckles of rain-cloud, and the ocean beyond the fall of land stretched off into the distance as a shifting slate pocked with the dapple of an entire submerged galaxy. And that single fleeting glimpse had been enough to capsize her world.

  ‘I can hardly put into words how this place makes me feel, Mike. There’s such a sense of isolation here, like nothing I’ve ever known before. Out here, it really does seem as if you’re cut off from the rest of existence. And I mean that in the best way possible. Because it’s actually not that isolated at all. Not really. Allihies is only a few minutes by car and maybe fifteen or twenty on foot. It’s a small village, but there’s a decent-sized shop, a post office, a choice of pubs. More than enough to get by. And for bigger needs, there’s always Castletownbere, the nearest town of any real consequence, probably not much more than half an hour back along the southern side of the peninsula. But, I don’t know, it’s like there are two kinds of reality out here. There are the facts, and then there’s something else. Within about a minute of seeing the place, you get the sense that when a storm blows even the least gale, the walls very quickly close in. This might be the twenty-first century, but civilisation around here feels only barely removed from myth.’

  The road out from Reentrisk to the cottage was narrow and full of twists, she said, a sort of boreen built with horses and, at a push, carts, in mind, and with a surface not always guaranteed to hold the weight of a vehicle. When the house first came into view below and on the right it was necessary to park the car on a verge and cover the last couple of hundred yards on foot, keeping to a suggestion of dirt pathway flanked and in places smothered with wild briar, down the steep hillside.

  No artist could begin to hope for more than what she’d found: spectacular views of beaten hills and ocean, huge skies and, best of all, the light, a strange spectral light, peculiarly heavy and in a constant state of flux. Just breathing this air made you want to cry and laugh at the same time. Here the world had simplified itself down to rocks, ocean, sky, wind and rain; these because everything else was fleeting, and you felt overwhelmed by such a sense of permanence all around, by the realisation that what you could see in any one moment and in any direction had always existed and always would. Holy men built monasteries in places like this, trying to capture part of the alchemy that coaxed time into standing still. The immensity of so much wildness brought on a kind of melancholy, it dwarfed you, made you feel small beneath greater things, but it also made you feel oddly and fully alive. In the midst of such scale, she said, her awareness couldn’t help but shift and become heightened.

  Conditions inside the cottage were bad, apparently. Crumbling plaster, smashed windows, the stench of things dead and rotten, gulls, vermin and, in one of the two small bedrooms, the one that looked westward out onto the ocean, the whitened remnants of something bigger, a dog or fox, but now just a kindling of bones splayed in the natural order of its undisturbed collapse. The work involved in returning this place to some habitable state would, of course, be immense and daunting, but Maggie could see beyond all the problems.

  Within an hour of her first sighting she had spoken on the phone with an estate agent in Castletownbere, a woman named Mairéad, who checked the company’s books and came back almost immediately with the good news that her agency had it listed as an executor sale for a firm of Cork solicitors. The deeds were missing, lost if they’d ever even existed, but this was a minor legal issue common enough with such old properties, especially in rural areas, and could be easily overcome. They met the
following morning and walked the site together. Mairéad was a short, smiling woman of about forty, with long reddish blonde hair and the sort of blushed complexion that seemed to suggest early onset menopause but may just have been the result of a morning spent chasing the clock and picking up the pieces in the aftermath of a hectic night. Armed with a small red plastic folder of printed information and a couple of Ordnance Survey maps, she led the way, pointing out the boundaries of the accompanying land and talking almost incessantly about the weather and what the area was like in summer, and about growing up on the other side of Allihies, how things had changed over the past few years and, more importantly, how much remained the same. She also provided Maggie with a list of reliable contractors who could see to the necessary refurbishments at a competitive price, but warned that the final tally was still likely to top out at a fairly high number, given the need for such a complete overhaul.

  ‘Are you sure this is what you want?’ she asked, considering Maggie after they had been through the carcass of the house and emerged again into the soft rain. Behind them, nests of young rats, disturbed by so much talk after being allowed to get by for so long without, screamed and chased frantic circles in the remaining thatch. ‘This place has been empty a long time. Too long to be natural, really. And people talk. It’s lonely out here, the kind of place where it’d be too easy to glimpse things. We have other properties, in much better condition, and with views that are just as stunning as this. They’d offer better value, too. A bit more up front but far less in the way of renovations. If you come back to the office we can go through them together. You won’t be disappointed, I promise. We have some real beauties on our books at the moment. I’m sure we’ll find something that you can move into immediately, if that’s what you want.’