Black Lake by Johanna Lane

suddenly aware that Marianne and his father-in-law had deserted them and that they were alone in the kitchen. “Oh, you know.” He wondered whether it would be enough to stave off Anna’s enquiries.
    “It can’t be easy,” she said.
    Anna was one of those people who liked to talk about things. He was glad his own mother hadn’t known her; they wouldn’t have got on with each other at all.
    “It must be hard on you, but it seems a very sensible decision to me. You’ll have the best of both worlds, am I right? You won’t have the worry of the maintenance.”
    He nodded glumly. “Shall I retrieve the others?” He told himself that she couldn’t be expected to understand—that she’d never lived in a place like Dulough.
      
    They took one of the last buses back into town. The daytime shoppers had become nighttime revelers. John and Marianne watched a young man lean a hand against a shop window and vomit onto the pavement. When he finished, he wiped his mouth and wandered back into a pub.
    In their room, Marianne took her second bath of the day, more, she explained, because of the abundance of hot water than anything else. This time she left the bathroom door open. For a good ten minutes, John wondered whether he should go in or not. At last, he shoved his shoes under the bed and took the chance.
    There was a towel rolled up under her head. The bubbles had all but melted and he could see the outline of her body under the water, her breasts and knees breaking the surface. He thought of that exhibition in London, of all those women, all those baths. She opened her eyes and smiled tiredly as he sat down on the loo seat. “Could you shut the door? It’s a little chilly.”
    He got up silently, obligingly. She closed her eyes again. He wasn’t sure when the balance of power had shifted. Was it when she’d had Kate? Was it when he’d signed the contract with the government? He hadn’t been watching for it because he hadn’t expected it. He tried to focus, to separate the years of their marriage, but he couldn’t. It was one long, looping roll of film, the same images repeated again and again: house, garden, sea, children.
    As he lifted his arm to reach down into the warm water, she got up suddenly and groped for a towel. Her eyes had been closed. She couldn’t have seen his hand rising to touch her, but he wondered whether she had somehow sensed it, whether it was an indication for him to back away. He went into the bedroom and picked up the paper.
      
    He woke before Marianne the next morning and, as he had done the day of the move, he quietly put on his clothes and slipped through the door. Outside, he headed for Stephen’s Green. People crisscrossed it here and there, the early-morning workers of coffee shops and bakeries. Though it was early summer, they dug their hands into their jackets and sank down into their collars. Some were wrapped in scarves. Mostly women, they wore cheap coats and shoes. They had pale, unhealthy-looking skin, the undernourished pallor of Eastern Europeans. This was the new city workforce; like America, Ireland had become rich enough to need such people, who, he imagined, probably lived in tenements on the north side and sent money home. He wondered whether they wanted to stay or whether they were counting the days until they could leave. He couldn’t think what the attractions of this modern Dublin were. To him it had changed for the worse. He could see that Marianne was invigorated by it, though, by the bursting shops and new cosmopolitanism, by the young Irish who looked, in contrast to the immigrants, healthy and confident.
    He could have taken up the government’s offer to buy Dulough right out from under them and they could have easily afforded a house in one of the better suburbs: Foxrock, Dalkey, Killiney. Or further out, in Wicklow—Enniskerry, perhaps, where he’d often stayed with his cousins on weekends away from college. But their beautiful old house had been