The Lake House

by Kate Morton

  Peter hesitated, but only briefly. He was fond of Alice. They weren’t exactly on a grandmother/grandson footing, but he cared for her, and in light of everything else that was going on he felt a responsibility to her. He opened the letter, just enough to see who it was from. Sadie Sparrow. It wasn’t the sort of name a person with a predilection for words forgot and Peter remembered at once the letter that had arrived exactly a week before. The police detective investigating the old case of a missing child. The case from 1933, the same year BM made his appearance in Alice’s journal and the disputed manuscript had been (presumably) torn out. Peter experienced the grim sense of pieces of a puzzle coming together, while remaining frustratingly in the dark as to what that puzzle’s picture revealed. He tapped his fingers against his lips, considering, and then glanced again at the thin sheet of paper folded on the desk. This really was snooping. It most certainly wasn’t part of his job description. Peter had a sense of himself perched on the edge of a cliff, deciding whether to jump or retreat. With a shake of his head, he sat down and began to read.

  * * *

  Alice decided to walk through the park. The fresh air, she told herself with more than a little constitutional irony, would do her good. She hopped off the tube at Hyde Park Corner and climbed the stairs. It was much warmer today than it had been earlier in the week. The air was still and the heat thick, that particular kind of city heat that seemed to magnify in the spaces between tarmac and building. The tube lines, with their seething serpents hissing through the tunnels, belching out sweaty commuters at each station, were like something out of Dante. She started along Rotten Row, taking assiduous note of the rose gardens and the faint scent of lilac, as if she really were walking because she fancied being alone with nature, and not simply to put off a little longer the awful task she knew was ahead.

  It was Deborah who’d forced today’s meeting. Alice, after Peter gave her the phone message on Friday (the horrific chill of hearing her assistant speak Benjamin Munro’s name!), had decided the best course of action was denial. There was no reason she and Deborah needed to see one another over the coming months. Eleanor’s anniversary had been and gone, the next family gathering wasn’t until Christmas, which left plenty of time for the whole thing to blow over. For Alice to make sure it blew over. But Deborah had been insistent, employing that particular brand of gentle force she’d always wielded as the eldest sister and further mastered during her decades as a politician’s wife. “There are things we simply must discuss.”

  Whatever the extent of Deborah’s knowledge about Theo, she’d evidently travelled a considerable distance down memory lane, arriving at a place that made Alice very nervous. How much, she wondered, did Deborah know? She remembered Ben, but did she know what Alice had done? She must. Why else would she insist they meet to talk about the past?

  “Do you remember Nanny Rose?” Deborah had said before ringing off. “Strange, wasn’t it, the way she left so suddenly.” Alice had felt the closing-in of walls she’d been holding back for a very long time. Extraordinary the way it was all happening at once. (Though in truth it was she, Alice, who’d triggered Deborah’s interest, with her questions at the museum. If only she’d kept her mouth shut.) Just that morning Alice had received a third letter from the detective, more brusque than the others and with a single worrying development. This Sparrow person was now seeking permission to go inside the house “to test a theory.”

  Alice stopped walking as a dragonfly hovered close. Yellow-winged darter. The name came to mind of its own accord. She watched as the insect flickered towards a nearby garden bed, a spectacular tangle of summer flowers, red, mauve and brilliant orange. Gardens really were a balm. A bee vacillated between blooms and Alice experienced a sudden flash of all-body memory. They came often lately. She could feel what it would be like to creep into that garden, her body lithe and ache-free, to snake beneath the cool foliage and lie on her back so that the sky broke into bright blue diamonds through the branches and her ears were filled with the choir of insect life.

  She didn’t, of course. She continued along the path, leaving the garden and the strange flash of memory behind her. It could only be the tunnel, she thought, this theory of Sadie Sparrow’s. She must have learned somehow of the second tunnel. Alice waited to feel panic but instead was visited only by a dull sense of resignation. It had been inevitable, she’d always known that. One of the biggest pieces of luck in the whole event had been the failure (to this point) of anyone to mention the tunnel to police. Because Alice hadn’t been the only one who’d known about it in 1933. There were others. Her parents, her sisters, Grandmother deShiel and Nanny Rose, who’d had to be told the winter Clemmie managed to get herself stuck behind its tricksy latch.

  Alice slowed down as she reached the part of Rotten Row where the path branched off to form a bridge across the Serpentine. Beyond the water was the great green stretch of the park. Alice could never look at it without thinking of the Second World War. There’d been sandbags then, and vegetables in rows, the whole expanse given over to productive purpose. It seemed a rather quaint idea now, a harking back to the medieval past, as if a starving, bombbattered nation might somehow be fed with the pickings from His Majesty’s royal vegetable patch. At the time it had seemed eminently sensible; more than that, it had seemed vital. Their boys were dying in foreign lands and bombs rained down on London at night and supply ships were being obliterated by U-boats before they could dock; but the people of Britain would not be starved out. They would win the war, one vegetable patch at a time.

  At the Imperial War Museum some years ago, Alice had overheard a couple of schoolboys sniggering at a poster of Potato Pete boasting that he made a good soup. The boys were lagging behind their classmates and when the teacher chastised them, the taller one looked as if he might cry. Alice had felt a ripple of schadenfreude. Why was it that so much of the paraphernalia left over from the war made it seem as if it had been polite or quaint or mannerly, when in fact it had been fierce and deathly? People had been different back then, more stoical. There was far less talk of one’s emotions. People were taught from childhood not to cry when they were hurt, to be good losers, not to acknowledge fears. Even Nanny Rose, who was sweetness personified, would have frowned to see tears when she poured iodine onto scrapes and scratches. Children were expected to face their fate when it came for them. Very useful skills, as it turned out, during wartime; indeed, as they were in life.

  The Edevane women had all pitched in when war broke out. Clemmie joined the ATA, moving planes between bases for the RAF; Alice drove a hearse-turned-ambulance through the bomb-broken streets; and Deborah corralled busy volunteers in the WVS. But it was Eleanor who surprised them all. Deborah and Alice had urged their parents to seek shelter in the country, but their mother had refused. “We’ll stay here and do our bit,” she’d said. “We wouldn’t think of skiving off, and you’re not to suggest it. If it’s good enough for the King and Queen, it’s good enough for us. Isn’t that right, darling?” She’d smiled at their father, who was already suffering with the pleurisy that would kill him, and he’d squeezed her hand in solidarity. And then she’d taken up arms with the Red Cross, bicycling around the East End offering medical assistance to mothers and children who’d been bombed out of their homes.

  Sometimes Alice saw the city as a map in her mind, with pins dropped in all the places to which she could claim a connection. That map was covered, the pins piling up on top of one another. It was quite a thing to spend the majority of one’s life in the same place. To acquire countless memories that layered in one’s mind so that certain geographic locations gained an identity. Place was so important to Alice’s experience of the world that she wondered sometimes how nomadic people gauged the passing of time. How did they mark and measure their progress if not against a constant that was so much bigger and more enduring than they were? Perhaps they didn’t. Perhaps they were happier for the lack.

  One of
the things that had most intrigued her about Ben was his itinerant nature. There were countless people made homeless after the First World War, sad men whose presence in streets all over Britain, holding signs that asked for work or food or money, cast a pall over the decade. Alice and her sisters were told to give when they could and never to stare; they were taught to pity. Ben wasn’t like those displaced soldiers, though. He was the first person Alice had met who lived that way by choice. Moving from job to job, no more possessions than what he could carry in his pack. “I’m a wanderer,” he said with a smile and a shrug. “My father used to say there was gypsy blood on my mother’s side.” For Alice, whose grandmother had always had plenty to say about the gypsies and vagrants who passed through the woods near Loeanneth, the concept was anathema. She had grown up grounded in the sureness and solidity of her family’s history. The legacy of her father’s people, their story of hard work and enterprise, the building of the Edevane empire; and her mother’s family, with its deep roots in the plot of land they still called home. Even Eleanor and Anthony’s feted love story centred around his rescue and restoration of Loeanneth. Alice had always thought it a terribly noble story, gladly taking on her mother’s passion for the Lake House. She’d never imagined there was any other way for a person to live.

  But Ben was different and he made her see things differently. He had no desire to possess things or to accumulate wealth. It was enough, he said, that he was able to get himself from one place to the next. His parents had worked on archaeological digs in the Far East when he was a boy and he’d realised then that the possessions people coveted in the fleeting present were destined to disappear; if not to turn to dirt, then to lie buried beneath it, awaiting the curiosity of future generations. His father had unearthed many such items, he said, beautiful objects that would once have been fought over. “And they all ended up lost or discarded, the people who’d owned them dead and gone. All that matters to me are people and experience. Connection—that’s the thing. That flicker of electricity between people, the invisible tie.” Alice had blushed when he said that. She’d known exactly what he meant; she’d felt it too.

  Only once had Alice heard him talk about his lack of money with unhappiness and regret. She remembered it because of the unpleasant emotion it aroused in her. He had grown up with a girl, he said, an English girl, a few years older, whose parents were working on the same dig as his. She’d taken him under her wing, being thirteen to his eight years old, and because they were two of a kind, together in a strange land, they’d bonded tightly. “I was a little bit in love with her, of course,” he said with a laugh. “I thought she was so pretty with her long plaits and hazel eyes.” When the girl—Florence was her name (“Flo’, he called her, the intimacy of the nickname a barb to Alice)—left for England with her parents, the two of them continued to write, letters that became more lengthy and more personal as Ben grew up. Each remained a constant in the other’s peripatetic life, and when he returned to Britain at the age of seventeen they reconnected. She was married by then, but insisted he stay with her whenever he passed through London; they remained the closest of friends. “She’s the most generous person,” he said. “Fiercely loyal, very kind and always ready to laugh.” Recently, though, she and her husband had fallen on hard times. They had a business they’d struggled to start, putting all their savings together and working themselves to the bone, and now the landlord threatened to evict them. “They’ve had other difficulties, too,” he said. “Personal troubles. Such good people, Alice, with modest desires. This is the last thing they need.” He’d been sharpening the pruning shears when he said, “I’d do anything to help them.” A new note of frustration entered his tone. “But the only thing that will make a difference is money and I’ve no more of that than what’s in my pocket.”

  The plight of his friend made Ben bitter and Alice, helplessly in love by now, longed to fix things for him. At the same time, she was filled with blackest envy for this other woman (Flo—how she hated the casual brevity of that nickname) who’d played such a vital role in his life, whose unhappiness, hundreds of miles away in London, had the power to blight his mood, right here and now.

  But time has a funny way of quieting even the most intense passions. Ben didn’t mention his friend again and Alice, who was young, after all, and therefore self-centred, let Flo and her plight slip from memory. By the time she told him about the idea she’d had for Bye Baby Bunting, three or four months later, she’d quite forgotten about the time he told her he’d do anything—anything at all—to get the money necessary to help his childhood friend.

  * * *

  On the other side of the Serpentine, a child was running towards the water. Alice faltered and then stopped, watching as the little girl or boy, it was hard to tell, reached the water’s edge and started tearing off small jagged pieces of bread, sprinkling them from a fist as a cluster of ducks gathered. A honking swan came quickly, seizing the remaining bounty in one fell swoop. Its beak was sharp and near and the child began to cry. A parent came, as parents do, and the child was easily mollified, but the incident put Alice in mind of the mallards at Loeanneth, so greedy and bold. She wondered if they were still there, and the wondering put a catch in her throat. That happened sometimes. After years of determined denial, a wave of brutal curiosity about the house, its lake and gardens that was almost breathtaking would come upon her.

  When they were children at Loeanneth they’d spent the summer in and out of water, their skin turning brown beneath the sun, their hair bleaching almost white. Despite her weak chest, Clemmie had been the most outdoorsy of them all, with her long, skinny foal’s legs and windblown nature. She should have been born later. She should have been born now. There were so many opportunities these days for girls like Clemmie. Alice saw them everywhere, spirited, independent, forthright and focused. Mighty girls unbounded by society’s expectations. They made her glad, those girls, with their nose rings and their short hair and their impatience with the world. Sometimes Alice felt she could almost glimpse her sister’s spirit moving in them.

  Clemmie had refused to speak to anyone in the months after Theo disappeared. Once the police had done their interviews, she’d shut her mouth, tight as a clam, and behaved as if her ears had switched off too. She’d always been eccentric, but it seemed to Alice, looking back, that during the late summer of 1933, in the weeks after Theo went missing, she became downright wild. She hardly returned home, prowling around the airfields, slicing at the reeds by the stream with a sharpened stick, creeping inside the house only to sleep, and not even that most nights. Camping out in the woods or by the stream. God only knew what she ate. Birds’ eggs, probably. Clemmie had always had a gift for raiding nests.

  Mother was beside herself. As if the anguish over Theo wasn’t enough, now she had to worry about Clementine, too, out there in the elements. Clemmie had come back eventually, though, smelling of dirt, her hair long and tangled, and none the worse for wear. The summer had ripened and rotted so that autumn when it fell was thick and sullen. With it, an interminable grief settled over Loeanneth, as if all hope that Theo would be found had died with the warmer season. When the police search was officially called off, the policemen full of apologies, the decision was made that the Edevane family should return to London. Deborah’s wedding was to be held there in November and it made sense that the family take a few weeks to settle in first. Even Mother, usually loath to leave the country, had seemed glad to escape the cold stultifying sadness of the Lake House. The windows were sealed, the doors padlocked, the car loaded.

  Back in London, Clemmie had been forced to wear shoes again. New dresses were bought to replace those she’d torn and outgrown and a place was found for her at a day school for girls that specialised in maths and science. She’d liked that. After a succession of old-fashioned governesses, none of whom had lasted long at Loeanneth, real school had been the sweetener, the reward for acquiescence. It had been a relief, in a way,
to see her brought back from the brink, but Alice had quietly mourned the loss of her savage sister. Clemmie’s reaction to grief had been so primitive, so raw, that even observing it had been a release of sorts. Her return to civilisation compounded the tragedy and made it permanent, for if Clemmie had given up hope, then there really was none left.

  * * *

  Alice had been walking faster than she’d meant to and an ache was tightening her chest. A stitch, she told herself, certainly not a heart attack. She reached a seat and sank onto it. She decided she would stay a moment and catch her breath. The breeze was light on her skin, and warm. In front of her was a bridle path and beyond it a playground where children were scaling colourful plastic equipment, chasing one another while their nannies, girls with ponytails, wearing jeans and T-shirts, chatted beneath a tree. Adjacent to the playground was a sand-covered enclosure where mounted officers from the Knightsbridge barracks were training. It struck Alice that this was very near the spot she’d sat with Clemmie that day in 1938. It was true what people said, that when one became old (and how sneakily that happened, how sly time was) memories of the long-ago past, repressed for decades, were suddenly bright and clear. A prim little girl had been taking riding lessons, round and round the sand in circles. Alice and Clemmie had been lounging on a picnic blanket discussing Clemmie’s intention to begin flying lessons. It was before the war started, and life in London for the daughters of well-to-do families was much as it always had been, but there was talk everywhere if you knew where to listen. Alice had always known where to listen. So, it seemed, did Clemmie.

  Seventeen by now, she had flatly refused to participate in the Season and only narrowly been stopped at the docks after selling a number of family heirlooms so she might travel to Spain and fight with the Republicans in the civil war. Alice, impressed by her sister’s grit, had nonetheless been glad to see her dragged back home. This time, however, seeing Clemmie’s doggedness, the fierce enthusiasm with which she brandished the newspaper advertisement for the flying school, Alice had promised to do whatever was necessary to help convince their parents to agree. The day was warm and they’d finished their lunch and a pleasant lull had settled over them, due in part to the recent accord they’d reached. Alice was leaning back on her elbows, eyes closed behind her sunglasses, when Clemmie said, apropos of nothing, “He’s still alive, you know.”