The Lake House

by Kate Morton

  Alice had felt a swell of relief so great it rendered her light-headed. Even the note on the table couldn’t put a dent in her spirits: Had to go, early flight scheduled. See you when I’m back. Need to talk. Important. C.

  She’d scrunched that piece of notepaper into a tight ball and thanked God for the reprieve.

  It turned out God could be cruel. Two days later, Clemmie was shot down over the ocean, four miles from the English coast. Her plane washed up but her body was never found. The pilot is presumed to have ejected, the report read, immediately before the plane was hit. Just one more loss in a world that had decided life was cheap. Alice was not self-absorbed enough to believe that other people’s fates were lived out in service to her own life’s lessons; she abhorred the expression “everything happens for a reason.” Certainly there were consequences to everything that happened, but that was an entirely different prospect. So, she chose to see it as an instance of simple coincidence, that the death of one sibling had spared her implication in the death of another.

  Alice still saw her sister when she least expected it. On summer’s days, when she glanced towards the pulsing sun and her vision starred; a black speck shooting through the sky, turning a graceful arc, falling silently into the sea; that little girl who’d run circles in the fields, arms outstretched; the second of Alice’s siblings to disappear. Oh that I had wings like a dove! for then would I fly away, and be at rest.

  The train slid into King’s Cross and the lovers hopped off, heading towards the exit. Alice fought an urge to follow them; just to remain, for a brief time, on the periphery of their heady infatuation.

  She didn’t, of course. She switched to the Northern line and travelled to Hampstead where she finally took the lift to the surface. She hadn’t time for wistfulness or nostalgia; she had to get back, to see Peter and set repairs in motion. It was a lovely afternoon up top. The day’s heat had slid away, the sun had lost its dazzle, and Alice walked the familiar path home.

  * * *

  Peter took up a yellow highlighter and drew it neatly over the lines. It was the end of a long day, and he allowed himself a moment of silent celebration. Alice’s publisher wanted the website up in a month’s time and he’d been tasked with providing the text—a job made rather more difficult than it might have been by the ardent refusal of the site’s subject to involve herself in its preparation.

  It wasn’t anything so simple or clichéd as an octogenarian’s refusal to admit the new-fangled; indeed, Alice made it a point of pride to keep up-to-date with technology. The internet had made a huge difference to policing practices during Diggory’s lifetime and Alice was stringent about maintaining realism in her books. Where she took umbrage was with the “insidious infringement’ of the public sphere into the private. Marketing was all well and good, she said, but when the author became more important than the books the world had surely tipped off kilter. Only with the fiftieth anniversary upcoming, and a personal plea from the head of the publishing company, had she been induced to accede, and only on one condition: “I don’t want to know about it, Peter. Just make it happen, will you?”

  Peter had promised that he would and proceeded gingerly, careful to avoid all mention of words like “online’ and “platform’ in her hearing. The author bio had been easy enough—they already had a standard document he kept updated for press releases—and Peter was rather proud of the special page he’d put together from the perspective of Diggory Brent himself, but he was working now on the Frequently Asked Questions section and things were progressing slowly. The problem was, the job necessarily relied on Alice’s responses. Without her cooperation he was stuck hunting through the archives for articles from which he might pluck answers.

  He had focused on the subject of writing and process, partly because he knew it would please Alice and partly because it made life easier. Alice didn’t grant a lot of interviews these days, and those she did were conducted under the strict condition that she would only talk about her work. She guarded her privacy with a fervour Peter worried sometimes (quietly, to himself and never where she might intuit his concern) was verging on the neurotic.

  He had, however, included a few personal questions out of deference to Alice’s publicist, who’d sent through a “short list’ of thirty suggestions, and in order to find answers he’d needed to go back decades. Alice’s own archives were less than ordered. There’d been some interesting and varied filing systems implemented over the years, and the task was more complicated than it might have been.

  But here, finally, success. In an interview with the Yorkshire Post from August 1956, he’d found a quote from Alice that, with a little massaging, could be made to fit one of the problematic personal questions:

  Q: What kind of child were you? Were you a writer even then?

  Peter looked back over the lines he’d just highlighted.

  I was always a scribbler, the sort of child told off for writing on walls, or carving my name into furniture. I was fortunate to be given great encouragement by a family friend, a published writer who never seemed to tire of indulging a child in her flights of fancy. One of the greatest gifts I ever received was my first journal. My father gave it to me. How I treasured that book! I carried it with me everywhere and developed a predilection for notebooks I’ve never lost. My father gave me a new one every year. I wrote an entire mystery novel, my first, in the notebook I received for my fifteenth birthday.

  It would do perfectly. Humming to himself, Peter scrolled down the document on his computer screen, hunting for the blank space awaiting an answer. Warm afternoon light spilled across the keyboard. A bus sighed to a stop on the road outside, a woman with laughter in her voice called for someone to “Hurry up!”, and down on the High Street a busker played Led Zeppelin on an electric guitar.

  Peter was already mentally packing his bags, envisaging the long bus ride home with Pip and Abel Magwitch for company, when another question in the document caught his attention. Or, more properly, the answer he’d typed below it.

  Q: In the Blink of an Eye was your first published Diggory Brent novel, but was it the first manuscript you ever completed?

  A: It was. I’m one of those rare, lucky authors who never had to contend with a rejection notice.

  Peter stopped humming. He glanced again at the highlighted lines.

  The two answers didn’t exactly contradict each other. There was a difference between completing a manuscript and writing a novel in a teenage journal, yet something tugged at Peter’s memory.

  He scrabbled back through the pile of photocopies on the desk, seeking the pages from which he’d taken the second Q&A. He found it in a 1996 interview with the Paris Review and read on.

  INTERVIEWER: In the Blink of an Eye was the first manuscript you completed, but surely not the first you’d started?

  EDEVANE: In fact it was.

  INTERVIEWER: You’d never set pen to paper to write fiction before beginning In the Blink of an Eye?

  EDEVANE: Never. It hadn’t crossed my mind to write a story, let alone a mystery, until after the war. The character of Diggory Brent came to me in a dream one night and the next morning I started writing. He’s an archetype, of course, though any series writer who tells you their character doesn’t share his or her preoccupations and interests is lying.

  Peter heard the clock on the mantelpiece ticking. He stood up, stretched, finished his glass of water, then went to the window. It didn’t matter how he tried to twist it, the two interviews were in direct contradiction.

  He went back to stand behind the desk, his cursor was blinking by the word “lying.”

  Alice was not a liar. Indeed, she was scrupulously honest; honest to the point of causing offence in many cases.

  The discrepancy was a mistake then. Forty years had passed between the first and second answers being given, in which time she’d forgotten. Alice was eighty-six years old. There were
parts of Peter’s childhood he couldn’t remember with any certainty and he was only thirty.

  Still, he wasn’t about to put anything on the web that risked Alice being called out. It wasn’t easy to get away with untruths or disparities anymore. Everything was instantly verifiable. Discrepancies were caught like insects in the web. It was no longer possible to be forgotten.

  Peter reached down to tap the keyboard idly with one finger. Not a big deal, just an irritation. He couldn’t exactly ask Alice directly which interview was accurate. He’d promised to make the website happen without bothering her and he valued his life too much to risk insinuating she’d told a fib.

  His eyes drifted again to the screen.

  It hadn’t crossed my mind to write a story, let alone a mystery, until after the war . . . How I treasured that book! I carried it with me everywhere and developed a habit for notebooks I’ve never been able to break . . . I wrote an entire mystery novel, my first, in the notebook I received for my fifteenth birthday.

  Footfalls scuffed on the steps outside, and Peter looked at the clock. The front door opened and he heard Alice in the hall.

  “Peter?”

  “In the library,” he called, hitting the shutdown button so his page reduced to a single electronic speck. “I was just finishing up. Cup of tea before I go?”

  “Yes, please.” Alice appeared at the door. “I’ve a few matters I’d like to discuss with you.” She looked tired, more fragile than he was accustomed to seeing her. She seemed to be wearing the day’s warmth in the creases of her clothes, her skin, her manner. “Any messages?” she said, sitting down to remove her shoes.

  “Jane called about the new novel, Cynthia wants to talk about publicity, and there was a call from Deborah.”

  “Deborah?” Alice looked up sharply.

  “Only half an hour ago.”

  “But I just saw her. Is she all right? Did she leave a message?”

  “Yes.” Peter shifted interview files aside to find his note. “It’s here somewhere. I wrote it down so I wouldn’t forget.” He found the piece of paper and frowned at his own scrawl. Deborah was always formal on the phone, but today she’d been unusually circumspect, insisting that he repeat her message to Alice verbatim, that it was important. “She said to tell you that she did remember him, and that his name was Benjamin Munro.”

  Fourteen

  Cornwall, 23 June 1933

  On his last morning at Loeanneth, Theo Edevane woke with the birds. He was only eleven months old and far too young to understand about time, let alone to be able to tell it, but if he had and he could, he’d have known that the hands on the big nursery clock had just gone to six minutes past five. Theo only knew that he liked the way the morning light caught the silver arrowheads of the hands and made them shine.

  With his thumb stuck in his mouth, and Puppy warm beneath his arm, he rolled contentedly onto his side and gazed through the half-light to where his nanny was asleep on the single bed within the nook. Her spectacles were not on her nose and without their metal arms to hold things together, her face had collapsed against the pillow, a series of lines and creases and soft saggy pockets.

  Theo wondered where his other nanny was, Nanny Rose. He missed her (though the details of what it was he missed were already fading). This new one was older and stiffer with a smell that made his nose tickle. She kept a damp handkerchief tucked inside her black cotton sleeve and a bottle of castor oil on the window ledge. She often said “there’s no such word as can’t’ and “self-praise is no recommendation’, and liked to sit him in the big black perambulator and wheel him up and down the bumpy driveway. Theo didn’t like sitting in the baby carriage, not now that he could walk; he’d tried to tell her so, but he hadn’t many words and Nanny Bruen had only said, “Quiet, Master Theodore. We did not ask Mr Rude along.”

  Theo was listening to the birds outside his window, watching the dawn creep along his ceiling, when the sound of the nursery door opening made him roll onto his tummy and peer eagerly through the cot rails.

  There, peeking back at him in the gap between the door and its jamb, was his big sister, the one with the long brown braids and freckles all over her cheeks, and Theo felt excitement and love explode inside him. He scrambled to his feet and grinned, slapping his hands on the edge of his cot so the brass knobs on the corners rang.

  Theo had three big sisters and he loved them all, but this one was his favourite. The others smiled at him and cooed and told him he was a sweet baby, but they couldn’t be counted on in quite the same way. Deborah put him down if he got too excited and clutched at her hair or clothes, and Alice could be laughing one minute, playing a tremendous game of peek-a-boo, when suddenly she’d get a funny look in her eyes, as if she could no longer see him, and with no explanation she’d be on her feet, way up high in the distance where the grown-ups lived, stabbing at her notebook with a pen instead.

  This one, though, Clemmie, never tired of tickling him and pulling funny faces and blowing big, wet raspberries on his belly. She carried him places, her warm, skinny arms wrapped tightly around his middle; and when she finally plonked him down, she didn’t stop him, as the others did, just as he’d found something really interesting to explore. She never used words like dirty and dangerous and no!, and when she came for him first thing in the morning, like she had today, she always took him through the kitchen where there were warm loaves of fresh bread cooling on the racks, and pots of lumpy strawberry jam in the larder.

  Theo snatched up Puppy in anticipation and lifted his arms high, wriggling his body as if he might somehow free himself from his cot if he just tried hard enough. He waved his hands, stretched his fingers out wide in joy, and his big sister smiled so that her eyes lit up and her freckles danced, and just as he’d known she would, she reached into the cot and dragged him over the edge.

  As she carried him joltingly towards the door, and Nanny Bruen snuffled a snore into her pillow, exhilaration made a star of Theo’s body.

  “Come on, Chubby Wubby,” his sister said, smudging kisses on the top of his head, “let’s go and look at the planes.”

  They started down the stairs together and Theo beamed at the red carpet runner and thought of warm bread with butter and jam spread on it, and ducks by the stream and the treasures he would find in the mud, and his sister’s arms out wide as she pretended they were flying; and, as they crossed the hall, he clucked laughter round his warm, wet thumb just for the joy of being happy and loved and here and now.

  * * *

  Eleanor heard the squeak on the stairs, but her sleeping mind took it for fodder, stirring it into a piquant dream in which she was the ringmaster in charge of a large, chaotic circus. Tigers who wouldn’t be tamed, trapeze artists whose feet kept slipping, a monkey who couldn’t be found. When she woke finally to the reality of her bedroom, the noise was already a distant memory, lost in the dark cavernous void with all the other night-time detritus that was shed in the crossover.

  Light, solidity, morning at last. After months of planning, midsummer had arrived, but Eleanor did not leap with alacrity from bed. The night had been interminable and her head felt like a wet sponge. She’d woken in the dark and lain for hours, her mind full and the room hot. Each sheep she’d counted had turned into a job on the list of things to be done today, and not until dawn had she finally fallen back into tumultuous sleep.

  She rubbed her eyes and stretched, and then collected her father’s old watch from the bedside table, squinting at its loyal, round face. Not even seven and it was stinking hot already! Eleanor collapsed back against her pillows. If this were any other day, she’d have put on her bathing suit and gone down to the stream for a dip before breakfast, before the others woke up and she had to be Mother. She’d always loved to swim, the silken water against her skin, the clarity of light on the rippling surface, the way sound thickened when her ears dipped beneath the surface. As a child, s
he’d had a favourite spot, particularly deep, down near the boathouse where verbena grew wild on the steep banks and the air was sweet and rotten. The water was wonderfully cold there, as she disappeared beneath the surface, twirling her body lower and lower till she was nestled among the slippery reeds. The days had been much longer then.

  Eleanor reached out, brushing an arm against the sheet beside her. Anthony wasn’t there. He must’ve risen early and was probably upstairs, avoiding the turmoil he knew from experience the day would bring. Until recently, she’d have worried to discover him gone already, tied herself in knots until she found him, alone; but no longer. She’d fixed things, and that particular fear could be laid to rest.

  A mower started up outside and Eleanor let go of a sigh she hadn’t realised she was holding. A mower meant the weather was fine, and thank God for that; it was one less thing to worry about. Rain would have been a disaster. There’d been thunder in the night, that’s what had first woken her, and she’d rushed to the window and pulled aside the curtains, dreading the wet world she knew she’d see outside. But the storm had been far away, sheet lightning and not the jagged sort that hurled down rain; the garden had been dry and moonlit, eerie in its stillness.

  In her relief, Eleanor had stood for a time in the darkened room, watching the faint undulations on the lake, silver-rimmed clouds being drawn across the pewter sky, nursing the uncanny sense of being the only person on earth awake. The feeling was not unfamiliar, it made her think of those nights when her children were babies and she’d fed them herself, much to her own mother’s distaste, curled up in the armchair by the nursery window. Little animal squeaks of satisfaction, tiny velvet hands on the moon of her swollen breast, the vast, still quietness of the world beyond.

  Eleanor had been fed as a baby in the same room, though under vastly different conditions. Her mother had not held with such “vampiric’ tendencies in infants, instructing Nanny Bruen—younger then, but no less ancient in attitude—to prepare sterilised cow’s milk for “the little stranger’, in one of the teated glass bottles that had been ordered specially from Harrods. To this day, Eleanor couldn’t smell rubber without experiencing a peaky wave of nausea and isolation. Nanny Bruen, naturally, had approved wholeheartedly of the regime and the bottles had been produced with military precision at intervals dictated by the cold-faced nursery clock, regardless of the rumblings of Eleanor’s small stomach. It was just as well, the two women had agreed, that the child should begin her education in matters of “order and punctuality.” How else was she to become a proper subordinate, taking her place gladly at the bottom of the family pile? Those were the bland, blancmange days before Eleanor’s father came and rescued her from her Victorian childhood. He’d stepped in when talk turned to the hiring of a governess, declaring there to be no need, he would teach his daughter himself. He was one of the cleverest people she’d ever met—not formally educated, like Anthony or Mr Llewellyn, but a great gentleman scholar with a mind that remembered everything it read and heard, that cogitated constantly, fitting pieces of knowledge together, questing for more.