The Lake House

by Kate Morton

  “When will you see that it’s too late? That I’m not that man anymore? That he died in France? The things that happened, Eleanor, the terrible choices, the monstrous decisions . . .”

  “Tell me about them. Tell me, please, and then I’ll understand.”

  But he never did, only looked at her and shook his head and turned back to his books.

  A woman at the entrance caught Eleanor’s attention. A handsome woman holding the hand of a small boy—three years old, Eleanor guessed—dressed very smartly for the occasion in a white sailor suit. He had a cherub’s face, big blue eyes, round flushed cheeks, and cupid-bow lips parted in wonder as he peered around his mother’s hand at the busy, brightly lit room.

  Eleanor felt a familiar tug of longing. She still hoped for another baby. More than hoped, she yearned. Ached with her desire to hold a child in her arms again, to tickle and kiss and cuddle a small, plump body. She reminded herself, sometimes, of the queen in Mr Llewellyn’s story, who’d lost her child and so craved another she was willing to deal with the devil to obtain one. Eleanor’s wasn’t an entirely selfish longing. There was a small part of her that wondered whether maybe another child, a little boy, was just what Anthony needed. He loved the girls, but didn’t all men want a son who would grow in their own image? Her hand went absently to her flat, firm abdomen. There were still occasional tender moments between them, when he was able; it was possible she would fall pregnant again. But despite her willingness, her eagerness, it had not happened in ten years.

  Wistfully, Eleanor forced herself to look away from the woman and child, sitting together now at a table, the little one careful to observe the manners he’d been taught, while his big round eyes gave him away, busily cataloguing the unfamiliar place. She turned back to the window, on the other side of which the world still glowered. The dark grey clouds had lowered further over London and the city was gloomy. The lights were on inside the tearoom and as Eleanor took in the warm interior mirrored in the dark window, ghosted commuters hurrying by beyond it, she met her own reflection by mistake.

  It was always a shock to catch oneself unexpectedly in repose. The woman looking back at her was a model of discreet respectability. Her back was straight, her clothes were fashionable without being modish, her hair was neatly set beneath her hat. Her face was a pleasantly drawn mask that gave nothing away. The sort of face other people’s gazes slid across. The woman in the glass was everything Eleanor had sworn she wouldn’t become. Certainly not the sort of person Eleanor the Adventuress might have been expected to grow into. Eleanor thought of her sometimes, her childhood doppelgänger, that little girl with wild, wide eyes, hair that wouldn’t be controlled and a fierce spirit of adventure. Eleanor liked to imagine she was still out there somewhere. That she hadn’t been subsumed but, rather, had turned back into a pearl and rolled away. That she was waiting somewhere for the fairies to find her and the woods to bring her back to life.

  The thought was upsetting and Eleanor did what she always did when dark thoughts threatened to undo her. She moved. A quick wave brought the waiter, she paid the account, gathered her handbag and the decoy dress she’d barely looked at before purchasing, and with a shake to open her umbrella, headed out into the rain.

  * * *

  The ticket office was teeming with people when she reached the station, the smell of wet clothing pervasive. Eleanor joined a queue of disgruntled travellers and made her way slowly to the front of the line. “I have a fare booked in the name of Edevane,” she told the booking clerk on the other side of the counter.

  The man began searching through his file box and as he muttered the names he was passing over Eleanor glanced behind her at the jostling crowd. “I gather the train is full,” she said.

  The man didn’t look up. “Previous train broke down. Been overrun all afternoon with folk trying to get themselves shifted onto the next one. Edevane, you say?”

  “Yes.”

  “Here we are then.” The man in the booth slid two tickets beneath the grille. “Departing platform three.”

  Eleanor turned to leave, looking as she did so at the pair of tickets in her gloved hand. She pushed back to the front of the counter. “My husband won’t be travelling with me,” she said when she had the clerk’s attention. “He was unexpectedly detained.” More excuses. She made them without thinking these days.

  “No refunds,” the man said as he started serving the gentleman behind her.

  “I don’t want a refund, only to return this ticket.” Eleanor slid it back across the counter. “I don’t need it. The ticket might as well be used by someone else.”

  Eleanor sat in the carriage, waiting for the train to leave the station. On the platform, men in suits strode busily this way and that, while porters pushed leaning towers of suitcases through the crowds and small groups of people performed the intimate rituals of farewell. It seemed to Eleanor as she watched them that some of the most vivid moments of her life had been enacted in stations like these. There’d been the day she first met Anthony, the lemonade in Baker Street underground station, and then the morning in 1914 that she’d waved him off to war. He’d looked so dashing in his uniform, Howard there beside him, both men gleaming with youth.

  When he told her that he planned to enlist, the two of them lying side by side on a blanket by the Loeanneth stream, a thousand reasons why he shouldn’t had crossed her mind. “But we’re so happy,” she’d blurted.

  “We’ll be happy again, when I come home.”

  “If you come home.”

  It was petulant, the first thing that came to mind and the worst thing she could have said. Selfish, childish and true. She kicked herself afterwards. The four years ahead would teach her temperance, but at the time, fear, panic and her powerlessness to stem their flow made her fierce. “It’s a war, you know. It’s not going to be a picnic.”

  He reached to push aside a stubborn lock of hair that had fallen across her eyes. His fingertips on her temple made her shiver. “I have medical training, Eleanor. I can be useful. Those men, my friends, are going to need people like me.”

  “I need you. There are other doctors, men with clinical experience.”

  He smiled softly. “You must know there’s nowhere else I’d rather be than here, with you, but who would I be if I didn’t go? How could I live with myself if I didn’t help? How would you look at me if I didn’t do my bit? If a man cannot be useful to his country, he is better dead.”

  She knew then that there was nothing she could say to change his mind and the knowledge burned. It tasted like ash in her mouth.

  “Promise me you’ll come back,” she said, throwing her arms around him and burying her face in his chest, holding on as if he were a rock in a raging sea.

  “Of course I’ll come back.” Not the merest shadow of doubt. “Nothing will stop me. I won’t let it.”

  They walked together to the station the day he left and she sat with him in the carriage as other young soldiers in fresh new uniforms climbed aboard; he kissed her and she thought for a moment she wasn’t going to be able to let him go, and then the whistle sounded and she was on the platform again, without him, and the train was moving, away, away. The house, when she got back to it, was warm and still. The fire in the library was burning low in the grate, just as it had been when they left.

  It was so quiet.

  A photograph of the two of them stood on the desk below the window, and as she looked at his laughing face, Eleanor tried to convince herself that he was upstairs, or outside by the lake, and that he’d be back any minute, calling to her from the hall to come and join him. But his absence told everywhere, and Eleanor glimpsed, suddenly, how long the coming days, weeks, months were going to be, how unbearably long.

  Thank God for her baby, for Deborah, who gave her somewhere to focus her attention. It was not so easy to wallow in the heat of electric fear when one was being watched b
y wide trusting eyes, a little person who wanted to smile and was reading her mother’s expression, looking for the signal that it was all right to do so. But behind the cheerful expression Eleanor forced, beneath the nursery rhymes she sang and the stories she told, she hardly dared to breathe. Every knock on the door shot a prickling flare throughout her body. Every story from the village of another soldier’s death was a wrench and, later, a secret reprieve because it wasn’t Anthony. The relief at finding a letter and not a black-rimmed telegram was short-lived when she read the date at its top and realised he’d posted it days before and anything might have happened since.

  The letters themselves gave nothing away, not at first. There were mentions of being shelled, of course, and of zeppelins being destroyed nearby, but his accounts made them sound like small inconveniences. When he had his first experience with German gas, it was “under the most ideal circumstances’, as they happened to have a fellow around showing them how “effective the preventative measures were.” Eleanor knew he was obfuscating and it mollified and infuriated her in equal measure.

  He had a weekend of leave in London and she met him, beside herself with nervous excitement, unable to settle to anything on the train, her book lying unopened on her lap the whole way. She’d dressed carefully but when she saw him she felt ashamed of her efforts, because it was Anthony, her heart’s own love, and her anxiety, her focus on such trivialities as which frock suited her best, seemed somehow to mark a lack of faith in them, in what really mattered.

  They both spoke at once when they met. “Shall we—” “I suppose—” and then, after an agonising hesitation in which it seemed for a moment as if everything they’d used to be had turned to dust, they both began to laugh, and they couldn’t stop, and were still being set off by the least trigger while they sat in the refreshments lounge drinking tea. After that they were themselves again, Anthony-and-Eleanor, and she insisted that he tell her all about it. “Everything,” she’d said, “no softening things,” desperate to get beyond the polite, inadequate surface of his letters home.

  And so he told her. About the mud, and the bones men broke trying to drag themselves through it, and the men whom it swallowed whole. He called the Somme a mincing machine and said that war itself was intolerable. He described the agony of failing “his men.” They were dying, he said, one after the other after the other.

  The letters home changed after that visit and she wasn’t sure she was glad. It crossed her mind that she ought to have been more careful what she wished for. The censor removed the worst bits, but enough remained for her to know that things continued grim, that war asked men to do horrific things and that it did horrific things to them in return.

  When Howard was killed, the tone of the letters changed again. There were no more references to “his men’, and he never mentioned another friend by name. Most chilling of all, where his letters had always been filled with questions about home, hungry for the merest detail about Deborah and the new little baby, Alice—I wish I were there, too. I ache to be so far away from all of you. Be strong, my love, and in the meantime, won’t you send me a lock of my baby’s hair?—now they were little more than cool, statistical accounts of what was happening at the Front. They might have been written by, and for, anyone. And so Eleanor had to wrestle at once with the twin griefs of Howard’s death—the shock of the news, its impossible finality; and the subsequent loss of her husband, who was already so far away, behind a wall of impenetrable politeness.

  On the day he returned for good, the twelfth of December 1918, Eleanor brought the two little ones to London to watch his train come in. There was an orchestra set up on the station, violins playing Christmas carols. “How will we know it’s Daddy?” Deborah had asked her. She was intensely curious about this person she knew only from the studio photograph in the frame beside her Mummy’s bed.

  “We’ll know,” Eleanor told her.

  Smoke filled the station as the train arrived, and by the time it cleared, servicemen were climbing down onto the platform. When she finally saw him, in the split second before his eyes found hers, she felt the four and a half years keenly. Anxieties crowded like moths around a flame. Would they still know one another? Would it be as it was? Had too much come to pass?

  “You’re hurting my hand, Mummy,” Alice had said. Not even two, and already filled with an admirable talent for forthrightness.

  “I’m sorry, Pumpkin. I’m sorry.”

  And then he’d looked directly at her and briefly she’d seen something in his eyes, a shadow in the shape of Howard and all the others like him, and then it was gone, and he smiled, and he was Anthony, her Anthony, home again at last.

  * * *

  The whistle blew outside. The train was about to leave and not a moment too soon. Through the window, Eleanor watched the soot-blackened tracks. It had been so wonderful to have him home. The girls couldn’t get enough of him. Loeanneth was brighter for him being there, things were clearer, as if someone had sharpened the focus on a camera. Life was to go on, just as he’d promised it would. Four and a half years had passed but the war was won and they would make up for lost time. And if sometimes his hands shook a bit, if he broke off mid-sentence and had to collect his thoughts before resuming, if occasionally he woke with a bad dream and refused ever to talk about Howard, well, they were understandable problems and would surely sort themselves out.

  Or so she’d thought.

  The first time it happened, they were outside in the garden. The girls had been chasing ducks and Nanny had shepherded them inside for supper. It was a glorious evening, the sun seeming to hesitate in the process of setting, as if it couldn’t bear to end the day. It was teetering on the horizon, throwing ribbons of pink and mauve across the sky like life ropes, and the air was sweet with jasmine. They’d brought the white cane chairs down from the house, and Anthony, having spent the afternoon entertaining the girls, had finally opened the newspaper he’d brought with him only to fall into a doze behind it.

  Edwina, the new puppy, was leaping about at Eleanor’s feet, pouncing on a ball the girls had found for her, and Eleanor was rolling it gently along the cooling lawn, laughing fondly as the puppy tripped over her ears to fetch it back. She was teasing the little dog, lifting the ball just out of reach for the pleasure of seeing her balance on her hind legs, cycle her little paws in the air, and then snap at it with her teeth. They were sharp teeth. The puppy had already managed to tear holes in most of Eleanor’s stockings. Darling little menace, she had a sixth sense for rooting out the things she shouldn’t have, but it was impossible to be cross with her. She only had to look up with those big brown eyes and cock her head just so and Eleanor melted. She’d wanted a dog when she was girl, but her mother had declared them “filthy beasts’ and that was that.

  Eleanor pulled back on the ball and Edwina, who loved nothing more than a bout of play wrestling, sank her teeth further into the rubber. Everything was perfect. Eleanor laughed, and Edwina growled excitedly at the ball before breaking into a rousing ruction with a duck, and the sun shimmered orange in the sky, and then suddenly Anthony was upon them with a mighty holler. In one swift movement, he’d grabbed the little dog and was holding her down, his hands around her neck. “Be quiet,” he was hissing, “be quiet.”

  Edwina yelped and howled, the duck fled, and Eleanor, shocked, jumped to her feet.

  “Anthony! No! Stop!”

  She was so frightened; she had no idea what was happening.

  “Anthony, please.”

  It was as if he couldn’t hear her, as if she weren’t there at all. Only when she ran to his side, fell down beside him and seized his shoulders, did he glance her way. He shrugged off her grip and for a split second she thought he was going to pounce on her, too. His eyes were wide, and she glimpsed that shadow again, the one she’d seen briefly at the train station when they welcomed him home.

  “Anthony,” she said again, �
�please. Let go of her.”

  He was breathing hard, his chest rising and falling, his expression shifting from anger to fear to confusion. At some point he loosened his hold on Edwina for the little pup wriggled free, emitting a small yelp of self-pity as she tore off to the safety of Eleanor’s chair to lick her wounds.

  Neither of them moved. It seemed to Eleanor later they were frozen by a shared sense, an unspoken agreement, that by remaining still they might somehow stop the egg from cracking further. But then she realised he was shivering and on instinct Eleanor took him in her arms and held him tightly. He was freezing. “There now,” she heard herself saying, “there now,” over and over again, just as she might had one of the girls scraped a knee or woken with a bad dream.

  Later, they sat together in the moonlit night, both of them silent and shocked by what had happened. “I’m sorry,” he said. “For a moment I thought . . . I could have sworn I saw . . .”

  But he never did tell her what he’d imagined he saw. In the years since, Eleanor had read reports and spoken with doctors and learned enough to know that Anthony must have been reliving a wartime trauma when he attacked Edwina, but he never would speak about the things that moved in the shadows. And they came again, those ghosts. She would be speaking to him and then catch him staring into the distance, his jaw tightening, at first in fear, later in resolution. She gathered over time that it was something to do with Howard, about the way he’d died, but Anthony refused to talk about it so she couldn’t be sure of the details.

  She told herself it didn’t matter, that he would get past it. Everyone had lost someone in the war, it would all be better with time. When his hands settled down he’d go back to his training; that would make a world of difference. He would be a doctor, just like he always planned—a surgeon; he had a calling.

  But his hands didn’t settle down, and things didn’t get better with time. They got worse. Eleanor and Anthony merely got better, together, at hiding the truth. There were terrible nightmares, too, from which he’d wake howling or shaking, urging them to move quickly, to leave, to make the dog stop barking. He wasn’t often violent, and it was never his fault when he was, Eleanor knew that. His great drive in life had always been to help and to heal; he would never knowingly harm another. Fear that he might, though, plagued him. “If the girls,” he began, “if it had been one of them . . .”