Black Lake by Johanna Lane Read Free Book Online Page A

had tried to make it sound smooth, almost welcoming, but the word had hard edges now. This inflection bothered Philip more than her distress. Leaving his mum and Kate in the kitchen, he slipped quietly out the front door. When he got to the big house, a different van to that of the movers was parked outside; it was dark green and said T . BOYLE & SONS , LANDSCAPERS on each side. The last word had vines curling around it, as if they’d sprouted from the letters. There was a white car, too: OFFICE OF PUBLIC WORKS , it said. They were the people in charge of Dulough now. They were the government, or part of the government, Philip wasn’t sure, but his father insisted that the family should be proud that Dulough was being made accessible to the Irish people. There was no one in either of the cars, but the front door of the house stood open, as if someone had just been through.
    Philip crouched behind a rhododendron, not far from the top of the cliffs, where two rows of trees marked the end of the demesne and the beginning of the sea. There was a steep drop of at least fifty feet behind him; there the garden ended and the beach began. He looked out over the lawn; one side had been churned up from green grass to black earth. A piece of orange twine ran the length of it, marking where the new path would be. It was three or four times as wide as the old one. At the end nearest him, two men were digging up the last part of it. They hadn’t noticed Philip and worked in silence, stopping only to slide packets of cigarettes out of their pockets. They smoked three each in half an hour, holding them between their yellowed thumbs and forefingers and sucking on them like straws as their boots sank into the mud.
    When the men had finished, they moved off in the direction of the higher gardens. Philip came out of his hiding place. They had turned up roots, worms, rocks, and a stream that ran under the old path towards the sea. Their work had disturbed its course and the water had begun to pool, swirling with earth, in the newly turned ground. Philip knew that if it wasn’t fixed, the whole lawn would be a pond by morning. That would upset his mother even more.
    First he picked out the bigger rocks; he would use them to make a channel for the water. He laid them carefully on the old path so that they wouldn’t sink back into the mud. Before he began his work, he picked up one of the longer cigarette ends and stuck it in his mouth; it was wet, but he moved it to the corner of his lips, like the men had, and it warmed up. When he had fixed the stream, he watched as it flowed, trickling over humps in the earth and brimming with butts and earthworms, away to the head of the cliffs.
    He was very dirty. The water had seeped over the tops of his boots, he had patches of mud on his knees, his hands were black. On his way back to the cottage, he noticed that the gardeners’ van had disappeared, leaving tire marks in the gravel, but the white car was still there. He crouched under the drawing room window. Three people sat, two men and a lady, on camp chairs around the unlit fireplace. They each had a teacup and there was a plate of biscuits on the floor in front of them. The lady was writing in a notebook. The younger man was gesturing, cutting the air in half with sweeps of his hands.
    Mrs. Connolly came in with a teapot, the one she used for good, and refilled their cups. Philip shrank back into the bushes. Without looking at her, the man put his hand over the top of his cup when she went to fill it. A drop of tea fell from the spout onto his white, freckled skin. He carried on talking as if nothing had happened, and Mrs. Connolly was away out the door, back to the kitchen.
    Philip took one more look at the people from the government and went inside the big house. He hoped there weren’t any more of them lurking about the place, that they were all safely penned up in the drawing room. The patterns of his old home had changed. Before, he was able