The Lake House

by Kate Morton

  Funnily enough, it was his obsessive consumption of nineteenth-century fiction that had brought him together with Alice. Peter had been at a crossroads after he graduated from university—there didn’t seem to be many jobs for people with postgraduate degrees in Constellations of Allegory: Enlightenment, Self, and Sensibility in Victorian Novels, 1875– 1893—and had given himself the summer to come up with a firm plan. The rent still needed to be paid so he was making some extra money by helping his brother David in his pest-extermination business; Alice’s call had come through first thing on a Monday morning. There was an ominous ticking noise in her wall that had kept her awake all weekend and she needed someone to see to it at once.

  “Thorny old girl,” David had told Peter as they hopped out of the van on Heath Street and headed towards Alice’s place. “But harmless enough. Strange habit of calling me out and then telling me what she thinks I’m going to find. Even stranger habit of being right.”

  “I suspect the deathwatch beetle,” she’d said as David unpacked his kit at the base of her bedroom wall and pressed his listening glass to the plaster. “Xestobium—”

  “—rufovillosum,” Peter had murmured simultaneously. And then, because David was staring at him as if he’d started talking tongues, “Like in ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’.”

  There’d been a brief, cool silence and then, “Who is this?” Alice had spoken in just the sort of voice the Queen might have used had she dropped by to inspect the pest-eradication progress. “I don’t recall your having had an assistant, Mr Obel?”

  David had explained that he didn’t have an assistant; that Peter was his little brother, helping out for a few weeks while he worked out what to do next. “Needed a break from all those books,” he’d added. “Getting too smart for his own good.”

  Alice had given an almost imperceptible nod before retreating, her footsteps echoing as she climbed the stairs to the room in the roof Peter knew now as her writing bower.

  David had clipped him on the shoulder later, when they were sitting in the smoky back booth at the Dog and Whistle. “So you woke the dragon and lived to tell the tale,” he’d said, draining the last of his beer and gathering up the darts. “What was it you said to her, anyway—that thing about the heart?”

  Peter had explained about Poe and his unnamed narrator, the careful precision of the murder he committed, his claims to sanity and his eventual undoing by guilt, while David, not of a gothic temperament, continued to hit one bullseye after another. Darts spent, he’d suggested cheerily it was lucky Alice hadn’t put Peter in the wall. “That’s what she does, you know: murder. Not real ones—at least, not that I know of. Commits all her crimes on paper.”

  Alice’s letter had arrived a week later, tucked inside the same envelope as the cheque to settle her account. It had been typewritten on a machine with a faulty “e’ and signed in navy-blue ink. The message was simply expressed. She was interviewing for a temporary assistant, someone to fill in while her permanent person was away. She would see him at midday on Friday.

  Why had he fronted up obediently as ordered? Hard to remember now, other than to say that observation had since taught him people tended to follow Alice Edevane’s instructions. He’d rung the doorbell at midday sharp and been admitted to the jade-green sitting room on the ground floor. Alice had been dressed handsomely in a pair of twill trousers and a silk blouse, a combination he now thought of as her uniform, and she’d worn a large gold locket on a chain around her neck. Her white hair had been neat and unfussy, set back from her face in waves that terminated with an obedient curl behind each ear. She’d seated herself at a mahogany desk, indicated that he should take the upholstered chair on the other side, and then made a bridge of her hands over which she proceeded to fire off a series of questions that didn’t seem remotely relevant to the position she meant to fill. He’d been mid-sentence when she glanced sharply at a ship’s clock on the mantelpiece, stood abruptly and reached to shake his hand. He could still remember how unexpectedly cool and birdlike it had felt. The interview was over, she’d said curtly. She had things to see to now; he should start the following week.

  The 168 bus slowed to pull in against the kerb at the top of Fitzjohn’s Avenue and Peter gathered his things. That meeting with Alice had been three years ago. The permanent person had mysteriously never returned and Peter had never left.

  * * *

  Alice was working on a particularly knotty scene, a transition. They were always the hardest to write. It was their very insignificance that rendered them problematic, the seemingly simple task of getting one’s character from important moment A to important moment B without losing the reader’s interest in the process. She’d never admit it to anyone, certainly not the press, but the wretched things continued to bring her unstuck even after forty-nine novels.

  She pushed her reading glasses further up the bridge of her nose, flicked the typewriter’s paper guide out of the way, and reread her most recent line: Diggory Brent left the morgue and started back towards his office.

  Perfunctory, clear, directional, and the following lines should be just as straightforward. She knew the drill. Give him some thoughts pertinent to the novel’s theme, an occasional update on his physical progress to remind the reader he’s making some, then a final sentence bringing him through his office door to where—voila!—the next surprise is waiting to propel him further through the narrative.

  The trouble was she’d already written just about every scenario she could think of and Alice was bored. It was not a feeling with which she was familiar, nor one she intended to indulge. Boredom, as her mother had always told them, was a state to be pitied, the province of the witless. Fingers poised above the keys, Alice considered weaving in some thoughts as to the quilt piece he was working on; an allegory, perhaps, for the unexpected turn the case had taken.

  They were useful, those little fabric squares. They’d rescued her more than once. Terrific to think they’d been a happy accident. She’d been seeking to give Diggory a hobby that would highlight his instinct for patterns at precisely the time her sister Deborah had fallen pregnant and, in a wildly uncharacteristic turn, taken up needle and thread. “It relaxes me,” she’d said. “Keeps my mind from worrying about all the things that might go wrong.” It had seemed just the sort of remedial activity a man like Diggory Brent might adopt in order to occupy the long night-time hours his young family had once filled. Critics continued to claim the hobby was an attempt by Alice to soften her detective’s rough edges, but it wasn’t true. Alice liked rough edges; and she was deeply suspicious of people determined not to have any.

  Diggory Brent left the morgue and started back towards his office. And . . . ? Alice’s fingers hovered above the typewriter keys. What then? As he walked, he considered . . . What?

  Her mind drew a blank.

  Frustrated, Alice flipped the paper guide back into place, lay down her glasses and surrendered her attention to the view from her window. It was a warm day in early June and the sky was a brilliant blue. As a girl she’d have found it impossible to resist the call of the outside world on a day like this, with its smell of sunlit leaves and honeysuckle, the ticking sound of concrete baking and crickets hunkering down in the cool underbrush. But Alice hadn’t been that girl in a long time and there were few places she preferred to be now, even when her creative powers had deserted her, than here in her writing room.

  The room was at the very top of the house, in a red-brick Victorian terrace high on Holly Hill. It was small with an angled ceiling and bore the distinction, according to the estate agent who’d shown Alice through the property, of having been used by a previous owner to keep his mother locked away. She’d become an inconvenience, one presumed. Alice was glad she’d never had children. The room was the reason she’d bought the house, though not because of its unhappy past. She had enough of that in her own family, thank you very much, and was quite immune to the foll
y of mistaking history for romance. It was the room’s position that had driven Alice to possess it. It was like a nest, an eyrie, a watchtower.

  From where she sat to write, she could look out over Hampstead towards the heath, as far as the ladies’ pool and beyond to the spires of Highgate. Behind her, a small round ship’s window offered a view of the back garden, all the way to the mossy brick wall and small wooden shed marking the rear limit of her property. The garden was dense, the legacy of another past owner, this one a horticulturalist who’d worked at Kew and devoted herself to creating a “Garden of Earthly Delights’ in her own backyard. It had been allowed to grow unruly under Alice’s care, but not through accident or neglect. She was most fond of woods, preferred spaces that defied manicure.

  Downstairs, the latch on the front door shook and the entry floorboards creaked. There was a thump as something dropped. Peter. It wasn’t that he was clumsy so much as his long limbs had a habit of getting in his way. Alice glanced at her wristwatch and noted, with surprise, that it had just gone two. No wonder she was hungry. She laced her fingers and stretched her arms forwards. She stood up. Frustrating to lose an entire morning to the rigours of pushing Diggory Brent from A to B, but there was nothing to be done about it now. Half a century as a professional writer had taught her there were some days when the best thing to do was to walk away. Diggory Brent would just have to pass the night in the no-man’s-land betwixt morgue and office. Alice washed her hands at the little basin by the back window, dried them on the towel, and then started down the narrow stairs.

  She knew why she was having trouble, of course, and it wasn’t as simple as boredom. It was the damned anniversary and the fuss her publishers intended to make when she reached it. An honour, well-meant, and ordinarily Alice would have enjoyed a bit of ceremony in her name, but the book was going badly. At least, she suspected it was going badly—and that was half the problem: how was she to know, really? Her editor, Jane, was clever and enthusiastic, but she was also young and awed. Criticism, real criticism was too much to hope for.

  In her darkest moments, Alice feared there was no one left to tell her when the standard dropped. That it must eventually drop she didn’t doubt; Alice had kept up with the works by other writers of her generation and genre and knew there was always a book in which it happened: the author’s grasp on the mores and minds of the modern world began to loosen. It wasn’t always glaring—the slight over-explanation of a technology readers took for granted; the use of a formal term when its abbreviation was the norm; a cultural reference that belonged to the year before—but it was enough to render the whole thing false. For Alice, who prided herself on the verisimilitude of her books, who’d been showered throughout her career with compliments, the idea of being allowed to publish beyond her best was chilling.

  Which was why she rode the tube, every afternoon, sometimes to places she didn’t need to go. All her life, Alice had been interested in people. She didn’t always like them, she rarely sought their company for reasons of social fulfilment, but she did find them fascinating. And there was nowhere better for seeing people than in the rabbit warrens of the Underground. All of London passed through those tunnels, a steady flow of humanity in all its weird and wonderful forms, and among them Alice slipped like a ghost. To age was contemptible, but the single silver lining was the cloak of invisibility gifted by the years. Nobody noticed the little old lady sitting primly in a corner of the carriage, handbag on her knee.

  “Hiya, Alice,” Peter called up from the kitchen. “Lunch in a jiffy.”

  Alice hesitated on the first-floor landing but couldn’t bring herself to shout back. Echoes of her mother’s long-ago lectures on decorum still rang too loudly in her ears. That was Eleanor, Alice thought as she started down the last flight of stairs; almost seventy years since they’d lived beneath the same roof and still she was setting the house rules, even here, in this house she’d never laid eyes on. Alice wondered sometimes, had her mother lived longer, what she might have made of her daughter’s life, whether she’d have approved of Alice’s career, her clothes, her lack of a husband. Eleanor had had very firm ideas about monogamy and its bonds of loyalty, but then she’d married her childhood sweetheart, so it wasn’t entirely a fair comparison. Mother loomed so large in the memories Alice kept of childhood, was so much a figure of the distant past, that it was almost impossible to imagine she might have moved with the changing times. She remained, for Alice, a beautiful, untouchable lady, beloved but distant, made brittle in the end by loss, the only person for whom Alice yearned, at times, with the fierce, bitter longing of a wounded child.

  She was not otherwise of a needy disposition. Alice had lived alone most of her adult life, a fact of which she was neither proud nor ashamed. She’d had lovers, each of whom had brought their clothes and toothbrushes across the threshold, some of whom had stayed for stretches, but it wasn’t the same thing. She had never extended an official invitation or made the mental transition to considering “my’ house “ours.” It might have been different—Alice had been engaged once—but the Second World War had put paid to the affair as it had so many things. Life was like that, doors of possibility constantly opening and closing as one blindly made one’s way through.

  She reached the kitchen to find a saucepan steaming on the stovetop and Peter standing at the far end of the table, a small parcel of correspondence open in front of him. He looked up when she came through the door and said, “Hello there,” right as the timer started ringing on the benchtop. “Perfect timing, as always.”

  He had a lovely smile, did Peter, quite curly, always genuine. It was one of the reasons she’d hired him. That, and he’d been the only applicant to arrive on the dot of the specified time. He’d since proven himself highly capable, which was no surprise; Alice considered herself to be an excellent judge of character. At least, she did now. There had been mistakes in the past, some more regrettable than others.

  “Anything urgent among them?” she asked, seating herself in front of the newspaper she’d left open at the crossword puzzle that morning.

  “Angus Wilson from the Guardian, hoping to set something up in time for the anniversary. Jane would like you to do it.”

  “I bet she would.” Alice poured herself a cup of freshly brewed Darjeeling.

  “The Natural History Museum asking you to speak at the opening of an exhibition they’re planning, an invitation to attend the celebration evening for Death Will Have His Day’s ten-year run, and a card from Deborah confirming the appointment this Friday for your mother’s anniversary. The rest, as far as I can tell, are from readers—I’ll get started on those after lunch.”

  Alice nodded as Peter set a plate in front of her, a boiled egg on toast. Alice had eaten the same lunch every day for the past two decades—though not, of course, on occasions when she dined out. She appreciated the efficiency of routine but she wasn’t a slave to it, not like Diggory Brent, who’d been known to instruct waitresses on the precise method of his preferred egg preparation. She spooned the almost-hard yolk onto her piece of toast and cut it into quarters, watching as Peter continued to sort the mail.

  He was not an overly conversational fellow, a fact that was greatly to his credit. Exasperating when she sought to draw him out on a subject, but preferable to the more loquacious assistants she’d had in the past. She decided she liked his hair that little bit longer. With his lanky limbs and dark-brown eyes, it made him look like one of those Brit Pop musicians, though perhaps it was only the unusually formal clothing he was wearing today, the dark velvet suit, that made her think so. And then Alice remembered. He’d been at his old friend’s funeral, the librarian’s, that’s why he was late for work. She felt somewhat cheered, eager to have his report. Alice had been struck when he told her about the woman, his mentor. Her mind had been cast back to Mr Llewellyn. She didn’t think of the old man often—her feelings for him were so bound up with that awful summer she made a poi
nt not to—but when Peter told her about his Miss Talbot, the lasting impression she had made on him, the interest she’d taken in his younger self, Alice had been beset with unusually visceral memories: the smell of damp river mud, and the plink of water bugs all around them as they drifted downstream in the old rowing boat, discussing their favourite stories. Alice was quite sure she’d not felt such perfect contentment since.

  She took another sip of tea, blotting out unwelcome thoughts of the past. “You saw off your friend then?” It was his first funeral, he’d said, and Alice had told him there’d be plenty more to come. “Was it as you expected?”

  “I suppose so. Sad, but interesting in a way, too.”

  “In what way?”

  Peter considered. “I only ever knew her as Miss Talbot. Hearing other people speak, though—her husband, her son . . . it was moving.” He shifted his fringe from his eyes. “That sounds stupid, doesn’t it? A cliché . . .” He tried again: “There was more to her than I knew and I enjoyed hearing it. People are fascinating, aren’t they, the closer you get to knowing what makes them tick?”

  Alice gave a slight, satisfied smile of agreement. She had found there were very few genuinely dull people; the trick was to ask them the right questions. It was a technique she employed when she was creating characters. Everybody knew the best guilty characters were those the reader didn’t suspect, but motive was key. It was all very well to surprise people with a murderous granny, but the rationale must be watertight. Love, hate, envy, each was as plausible as the other; it was all a matter of passion. Discover what excited a person’s passions and the rest would follow.

  “Here’s something a bit different.” Peter had returned to his work, opening reader letters, and his dark brows drew together in a frown as he scanned the one in hand.