Manderley

Manderley is Michael Noonan’s name for the unsettling dreamlike quality that gathers around Sara Laughs. It turns a familiar lakeside place into something both remembered and uncertain: details from dreams seem to recur in waking life, while ordinary explanations remain possible. The feeling shapes Michael’s perception of his return and connects the house to the strange events that preceded it.

The Name and Its Associations

The name first attaches to a dream from Michael’s Manderley series. After driving up the lane above the lake, he stops beside the board sign bearing the words SARA LAUGHS, burned into varnished wood and nailed to a tree. Its ordinary, handmade appearance recalls the dream, in which someone had put a radio-station sticker on the sign. The remembered image makes the real sign seem charged with expectation, though nothing on it confirms the dream.

Michael checks the board closely. He knows that sunflowers had appeared in the dream and that a photograph in his suitcase showed them growing out of the stoop, but there are no sunflowers there now, and no radio-station sticker on the sign. The mismatches do not dissolve the unease; instead, they sharpen the question of what the remembered images prove. When he returns to the board and touches the spot where the sticker had appeared in the dream, his fingers seem slightly sticky. Varnish warmed by the sun could account for the sensation, as could his imagination. The episode establishes Manderley as an atmosphere of suggestive correspondences, not a settled explanation.

Recurrence Around Sara Laughs

Looking back over the oddities associated with his return, Michael groups the repeating dreams, sunflowers, imagined sticker, and nighttime weeping together. He distinguishes these from his encounter with Mattie and Kyra and a subsequent telephone call from the representative of Pixel Easel: those events were strange in a more ordinary, circumstantial way, unlike the sound of a child sobbing in the night. Manderley thus names not simply the presence of unusual events but the particular uncanny pressure through which they seem to belong to one another.

The list also brings Michael to the fact that he and Johanna were in Derry, rather than at Dark Score Lake, when she died. He cannot remember why that was so. He recalls being occupied with a screenplay for The Red-Shirt Man in the fall and winter of 1993, then absorbed in All the Way from the Top from February 1994 onward. His eventual thought that visiting Sara Laughs had been Johanna’s role gives the setting’s mystery a personal dimension: she had been the one to suggest a trip to the TR, but had not done so in the year before her death, and Michael had not thought to suggest it himself. His absorption in writing may explain the omission, though he finds that explanation difficult to accept.

Landscape and Historical Memory

At Tidwell's Meadow, Michael encounters Manderley as a quality of the landscape as well as of the house and dreams. From the meadow he can see the lake below and the White Mountains beyond it. Under a hazy sky, the water appears gray when viewed from one angle and blue from another. The shifting view accompanies his sense of mystery, making the name describe an unsettled way of seeing rather than a fixed property of the place.

The meadow also carries a history that extends beyond Michael’s private memories. He recalls that more than forty Black people settled there around the turn of the century, though the community remained for only a time. Most were related, many were talented musicians, and many belonged to a group first called The Red-Top Boys and later Sara Tidwell and the Red-Tops. They had bought the meadow and a substantial stretch of lakeside land from Douglas Day, saving the purchase money over ten years, according to Son Tidwell, who handled the negotiations. The view’s quiet mystery therefore rests over a specific, partly vanished human history. Manderley gathers dream, present landscape, and the past into one atmosphere while leaving their connections unresolved.