The Lake House

by Kate Morton

  This process she repeated once, twice, three times, before finding one that, though not perfect, looked as if it might do the trick. She put it in her pocket and started searching for the next.

  Alice was the best at finding stones. She was one of those people who always won at games because she had a love for detail and a stubborn nature that refused ever to give up. They used to spend hours down here selecting and then tossing their prized skimmers. They’d cartwheeled, and made swings with the long, sinewy boat ropes, and built elaborate cubby houses in the gorse. They’d fought and tickled and laughed, administered sticking plasters to one another’s knees, and fallen asleep, tired and sweaty, beneath the May bushes as the afternoon sun bleached colour from the garden. But Alice was different now, this summer, and Clemmie had been abandoned.

  She picked up a light-coloured stone with funny speckles and rubbed it clean with her wet thumb. It was ever since they’d come down from London. They were all used to the way Alice became lost behind her notebooks, in the makebelieve worlds of her stories, but this was different. She was moody, swinging from over-the-top glee to sullen exasperation. She’d taken to making weak excuses to be alone in her bedroom—I need to lie down . . . I’m busy writing . . . I have a headache . . . —and then sneaking away so that when Clemmie went to find her she wasn’t there.

  Clemmie glanced back to where Theo was digging with a stick in the dirt by the stream. He hooted happily as a grasshopper leapt from one reed to another and she smiled wistfully. Theo was a glorious little fellow, but she missed Alice and would have done anything to have her back, for things to be as they had been before. She missed both her sisters. The two of them had gone on without her, becoming grown-ups without so much as a backward glance. Alice with that mooning expression, and Deborah engaged to be married. Clemmie felt it as a betrayal. She was never going to be like them, never going to grow up. Grown-ups were mystifying. Clementine despaired at the weary tedium of their instructions (“not now’, “slow down’, “stop it at once’); the dull conversations, the mysterious headaches, the excuses they made for absenting themselves for any activity that might prove fun; and she resented the infinite small betrayals, the realm of insinuation and nuance in which they moved, of saying one thing and meaning another. Clemmie lived in a rather more black-and-white world. For a pilot, there was much to be said for binary choices: yes or no, up or down, right or wrong.

  “No!” she hissed, a self-reproach. Her mood had already cast a shadow over the sunlit morning and now the very thing she’d been trying not to think of was back in her mind. The thing she’d seen. Bodies, naked, twisted and moving—

  No. Clemmie screwed her eyes shut and shook it away.

  She knew why the awful pictures were back. It had been a day like this one when she saw them; she’d been down to the base, watching the planes, and was on her way home.

  Clemmie stabbed at the ground with her foot. If only she’d gone home earlier, anything to have stopped her from cutting back through the woods right then and past the boathouse. The awful sight of them, the fright and confusion as she tried to make sense of what they were doing.

  “Poor love,” Deborah had said when Clemmie confided the horrible scene, unable to keep it to herself any longer. “You’ve had a terrible shock.” She’d taken Clemmie’s hands and said she wasn’t to worry about it anymore. She was absolutely right to have told, but now she must put it out of her mind. “I’ll take care of things, I promise.” Clemmie had thought that sounded a bit like promising to put a shattered eggshell back together, but Deborah had only smiled in the face of doubt, and her face was so serenely beautiful, her voice so certain, that Clemmie’s cares had momentarily flown away. “I’ll speak to her myself,” Deborah had vowed. “You’ll see—everything will be all right.”

  Clemmie jiggled the stones in her pocket and bit absently at her thumbnail. She still wondered whether she should have gone to Mother or told Daddy what she’d seen. When she’d asked Deborah, though, her sister had said not. She’d said that Clemmie should forget all about it, that she mustn’t tell anyone, not another soul. “It would only upset them, Clem, and we don’t want that, do we?”

  She seized a pinkish oval-shaped stone, lined it up between her thumb and index finger. Clemmie had considered going straight to Alice after she saw them, and perhaps if they’d been closer she would have, but with the way things were, the new distance that had appeared so suddenly between them . . . No, she’d done the right thing. Deborah was the sort of person who knew what to do in every situation. She would take care of it.

  “Mi-mi?”

  Theo was watching her solemnly, his baby face intent on hers, and Clemmie realised she was frowning. She rustled up a smile and, after a second’s consideration, he mirrored the happy expression, his little face crinkled and bonny, his equilibrium restored. Clemmie felt a wave of melancholy, gladness and dread combined. What faith he had in her! What faith he had, that one little smile was all it took to transform his mood entirely. She made her face serious again and the smile left his eyes. She had complete power over him and for Clemmie, powerless in so many other ways, the realisation was heady. She felt his vulnerability keenly. How easy it would be for a bad person to misuse that sort of trust!

  Clemmie was distracted then by the noise of the mowing machine. Rather, its cessation. The burr of the mower was so much a part of summer mornings that she hadn’t noticed it until the rattling stopped and other sounds—the stream, the early birds, her brother’s baby chatter—were suddenly louder.

  A cloud fell across her face. She knew who it was behind the mower and the last thing she wanted was to see him, that man. Not now, not ever again. She wished, wished, wished he’d go away, far from Loeanneth. Then maybe she’d be able to forget what she’d seen in the boathouse and everything would go back to how it had been before.

  Clemmie hoisted Theo onto her hip. “Come on, Wubba-dub-dub,” she said, dusting off his muddy hands. “Climb aboard, time for take-off.”

  He was an amenable child; she’d heard Mother say as much to Nanny Bruen when she replaced Nanny Rose a fortnight before (amenable and very good-natured, the pleased, surprised tone implying that the preceding child, Clemmie, had been neither). He didn’t protest, leaving his explorations behind and nestling into position on her back, Puppy tucked safely in the crook of his elbow. Keeping her balance, Clemmie stepped across the stones to the other side of the stream and set off towards the airbase beyond Jack Martin’s farm. She went at a clip, arms hooked under Theo’s knees, and she didn’t look back.

  * * *

  Ben jumped down from the mower and crouched on the grass by its motor. The chain was where it should be, there was nothing stuck in the blades, the ground he was trying to mow was flat. There ended his knowledge of things mechanical. He supposed there was nothing for it but to give the machine a few minutes to rethink its position.

  He sat back and fumbled in his shirt pocket for matches. Morning sun warmed the back of his neck and promised a sweltering day. He could hear sparrows clearing the trills from their throats and an early train leaving the station, and could smell the sweet tea roses and fresh-cut grass.

  A biplane flew overhead and Ben watched until it turned into the merest speck and disappeared. His gaze fell and he saw that the sun had hit the side of the house. It reached along the leadlight windows up top—the bedrooms, he knew—and he felt the same pull of longing he always did. He cursed himself for a fool and looked away, drawing on his cigarette. His feelings were irrelevant; worse than that, they were a liability. He’d already crossed too many lines. He was ashamed of himself.

  He was going to miss this garden when he went. His contract had only ever been temporary—he’d known that when he started, he just hadn’t known how soon it would end and how much he’d want to stay. Mr Harris had offered to extend his employment but Ben had told him he had other things to attend to. “Family business,
” he’d said, and the older man had nodded and patted Ben on the shoulder as Adam pottered about in the shed behind them, thirty-three years old but wide-eyed as a puppy. Ben didn’t offer any more details, he certainly didn’t mention Flo and her problems, he didn’t have to. Mr Harris understood the responsibilities of family better than most. Like all who’d celebrated the safe return of a loved one from the Great War, he knew that those boys might’ve come back but they never really came home.

  Ben ducked beneath the arbour and paused by the fishpond when a memory crept upon him like a shadow. This was the spot where Alice had first read to him from her manuscript. He could still hear her voice, as if it had somehow been captured by the leaves around them and was being played back now, just for him, like a gramophone recording.

  “I’ve had a brilliant idea,” he heard her say, so young and innocent, so full of joy. “I’ve been working on it all morning and I don’t like to boast, but I’m sure it’s going to be my best.”

  “Is it?” Ben had said with a smile. He’d been teasing, but Alice had been far too excited to notice. She’d leapt on with telling him about her idea, the plot, the characters, the twist, and the intensity of her focus—her passion—changed her face completely, bringing an animated beauty to her features. He hadn’t noticed she was beautiful until she spoke to him of her stories. Her cheeks flushed and her eyes shone with intelligence. And she was very clever. It took a certain kind of brain to figure out a puzzle—to look ahead and see through all the possible scenarios, to be so strategic. Ben didn’t have that kind of brain.

  In the beginning he’d simply enjoyed her enthusiasm, the indulgence of being told a story while he worked, the chance to bat ideas back and forth, which was so much like play. She made him feel young, he supposed; her youthful preoccupation with her work, with the very moment they were in, was intoxicating. It made his adult worries disappear.

  He’d known her parents wouldn’t approve of them meeting like that, but he hadn’t thought it would do any harm. And it hadn’t at first. He’d never imagined at the start—neither of them could have guessed—where it would lead. But he was older than Alice; he should have known; he should have been more careful. The human heart, life, circumstances—they were tricky things to govern; by the time he realised what was happening, it was too late.

  His cigarette was finished and he knew he should be getting on. Mr Harris had given him a list of things to be done in preparation for the party, there was a still a bonfire to stack, and he’d have to send someone back to sweet-talk the mower.

  Ben glanced around to check there was no one lurking and then took out her letter. He’d done this so many times before, the fold marks were worn soft and the parts of the words that had once been there had disappeared. Ben remembered them, though, like whispers. She certainly knew how to write; she had a beautiful turn of phrase. He read each line slowly, carefully, and paragraphs that had once made him joyous now made him heavy with regret.

  He would miss this place. He would miss her.

  A bird flew low overhead, sounding a reprimand, and Ben folded the letter and put it back inside his pocket. There were things to be done and it did no good to focus on the past. “She’s going to be a huge fire tonight,” Mr Harris had said, nodding at the stack of wood they’d chopped during the week, a half-smile forming. “They’ll be able to see it from Caradon Hill. You know, there’s an old saying round here that the bigger the Midsummer fire, the better a man’s luck in the year to come.”

  Ben had heard the saying before. Alice had already told him.

  Fifteen

  Cornwall, 2003

  Clive Robinson was a thin, spry man of almost ninety years. He had a high, lined forehead and thick white hair, a large nose and a broad smile. He still had all his teeth. His gaze was clear and keen, the sort that suggested a quick mind, and he was watching Sadie through enormous glasses with brown Bakelite frames that she’d immediately suspected, and quickly confirmed with a glance at the photographs on the wall, he’d been wearing since the 1970s.

  “The heat of that summer,” he said, shaking his head, “it was the sort that gets right under your skin, makes it near impossible to sleep. Dry, too, weeks without a drop so that the grass was beginning to fade. Not at the Lake House, mind. They had people, gardeners, to make sure that didn’t happen. It was all done up when we got there, lanterns, streamers, floral wreaths. I’d never seen anything like it, ordinary lad like me, a place like that. It was so beautiful. They sent out cakes for us at teatime. Can you imagine that? Day after their little boy went missing, and they sent out fairy cakes. Prettiest things I’d ever seen, all iced specially for the party the night before.”

  Sadie had made contact with the retired policeman as soon as she’d received his letter. He’d printed his phone number at the bottom and she’d gone straight inside to ring him, the ramifications of her discovery on the 1664 floorplan still pulsing beneath her skin. “I’ve been waiting for you,” he’d said when she told him who she was, and the fact wasn’t lost on Sadie that it was precisely what the old man in Eleanor’s Magic Doorway had said when Eleanor arrived to right his wrong. The way he said it, Sadie hadn’t been sure at first whether he meant for the twenty-four hours since he’d written or the seventy years since the case was stamped unsolved. “I knew someone would come eventually, that I wasn’t the only one who still thought about them.”

  They’d talked briefly over the phone, each sounding the other out, swapping police credentials (Sadie neglecting to mention she was in Cornwall on enforced leave), and then they’d broached the case. Despite its pressing newness, Sadie had restrained herself from blurting out her tunnel theory, saying only that she was finding information hard to come by, that she’d been limited so far to Pickering’s account, to which Clive had given a snort of amused derision.

  “He’s a little short on solid information,” Sadie agreed.

  “That’s not all the poor man was short on,” said Clive with a laugh. “Not to speak ill of the dead, but I’m afraid Arnold Pickering wasn’t standing in line when the Almighty handed out smarts.”

  He’d asked if she wanted to come and see him, and Sadie had suggested the following day. “Make it morning,” he’d said. “My daughter Bess is coming at midday to take me to an appointment.” He’d paused before adding, sotto voce, “She doesn’t approve of my ongoing interest in the case. She calls it obsessive.”

  Sadie had smiled into the phone receiver. She knew the feeling.

  “She’d rather I took up bridge, or stamp collecting.”

  “Secret’s safe with me. I’ll see you at nine.”

  And so, here she was, on a bright Saturday morning, sitting in Clive Robinson’s kitchen in Polperro with a pot of tea and a plate of digestive biscuits and sliced fruitcake between them. There was an embroidered cloth spread over the built-in table, iron creases suggesting it had been laid out freshly. Sadie had been unexpectedly touched when she noticed a small tag on its hem and realised it was the wrong side up.

  If Clive had seemed genuinely pleased to see her, the enormous black cat he lived with was clearly incensed by the incursion. “Don’t take it personally,” Clive had said when Sadie arrived, ruffling the hissing animal beneath the chin. “She’s sore at me for going abroad. Quite possessive, my Mollie.” The animal was watching proceedings now from the space between two pots of herbs on the sunny window ledge, purring sourly as her tail flickered a warning.

  Sadie took a biscuit and surveyed the remaining questions in the list she’d made for Clive. She’d resolved to test the waters before deciding whether or not she could trust the old policeman with her theory; there was also the small matter of verifying his competence as a source. Although she’d been thrilled to line up the interview, Sadie had been dubious as to how much a man pushing ninety would remember of a case he’d worked on seventy years before. But Clive had quickly assuaged her doubts and several pa
ges of her writing pad were now filled with scribbled notes.

  “I’ve never been able to forget it,” he’d said as he poured their tea through a strainer. “Might not think it to look at me but I’ve got a good memory. The Edevane case in particular has stuck with me. Couldn’t have got rid of it if I’d tried.” He’d lifted narrow shoulders that sloped away beneath his well-pressed collared shirt. He was of the generation that put stock in such matters of personal grooming. “It was my first, you see.” He considered her through his thick lenses. “Well, you’re with the police, you know what I mean.”

  Sadie had said that she did. No amount of training prepared a person for the storm and stress of their first real case. Hers had been a domestic violence call. The woman had looked like she’d gone ten rounds in the ring, her face was black and blue, her lip split open, but she’d refused to press charges. “Walked into the door,” she told them, not even bothering to think up an original lie. Sadie, fresh out of training and nursing her own demons, had wanted to arrest the boyfriend anyway. The injustice had burned. She couldn’t believe they had no choice; that without the victim’s cooperation there was nothing to do but issue a warning and walk away. Donald had told her to get used to it, that there was no limit to what a frightened spouse would do to protect their abuser, that the system made it hard for them to leave. The smell of that apartment was still as fresh as if it happened yesterday.

  “It was my first taste of grief,” Clive Robinson had continued. “I’d been sheltered as a lad, happy family, nice-enough house to live in, brothers and sisters and a granny up the road. Hadn’t even been to a funeral when I started with the police. Went to my fair share afterwards, though, I can tell you.” He frowned at something beyond her shoulder, remembering. “That house, those people—their helplessness, the desperate looks on their faces—even the air inside the rooms seemed to know that something had been lost.” He swivelled his teacup on its saucer, small adjustments as he chose his words. “It was my first time.”